Creating Fortnite and the Future

Geremy Mustard was thirteen years old when he started borrowing his dad’s massive fifty-pound work “laptop” to play the game Nibbles, in which the player moves a snake around the screen and collects numbers. The snake gets longer each time it “eats” a number, and if the snake ever runs into its tail, the game ends.

But this simple serpentine game became a game-changer for Mustard—and his future. After playing Nibbles for a while, he realized that instead of pushing start on the opening screen of the game, he could scroll down and see the game’s code in BASIC programming language. “This is it,” he realized. “This is what makes the game.”

Mustard read through the code, trying to understand how it worked and wondering if there was a way to make the snake longer. Once he found what seemed to determine the snake’s length, he changed the number in the code. Then he ran the program and played the game again. This time, his snake grew and grew and grew and grew.

When Mustard realized he had molded the game to do something original, he was amazed—and hooked. “Something in my brain just shifted, and I realized I have the power to make whatever I want,” Mustard recalls. “From that point forward, I just became super passionate about learning everything about computers.” With only a few example programs, Mustard taught himself BASIC and made his first game by the end of that year.

NEVER STOP LEARNING

Mustard had no internet access at home, and tools like AOL didn’t exist yet, so he borrowed books on programming from the local library. At night, he would read in the closet to avoid disrupting his brother’s sleep in their shared room. Local ward members and his parents’ friends supported Mustard’s growing interest, giving him books and their old computer disks with programming languages.

Mustard’s hometown of Houston was also home to Compaq Computers, one of the two largest computer companies at the time, and his high school was one of the few that had a computer science program in the 1990s. The computers they used were ancient 286 computers with only 640 KB of RAM and five-inch floppy disks. Mustard tested the limits of programming and the language Pascal, taking simple assignments and making them as big as possible.

One assignment was to create a simple, text-based adventure with prompts like “There is a room in front of you with a door to the east, a door to the west, and a potion in the center of the room. What do you want to do?” Since the story was text-based, the player had to visualize the story in their head. That wasn’t enough for Mustard. He wanted to stretch his skills and make a visually animated game, and this technically fit within the parameters of the assignment, which said the player needed to navigate through a grid. Mustard decided his grid would be visual, with animated walls and floors that would appear on the screen. While coding his game, he developed his own ASCII art animation tool that allowed him to create a character who could run, jump, climb things, and pull out a sword. He drew and animated characters, saved them into his proprietary file system, loaded them into his game, and created one level to play through with an actual boss fight at the end. “If I’d had one more day, I would’ve made another level,” he says.

When Mustard turned in his assignment, his teacher was baffled. He asked, “Geremy, what are you doing? That’s not the assignment.” Mustard explained how he met all the requirements of the assignment, just not in the way the teacher expected. Mustard continued to see his assignments as a way to build the things that were in his mind. By the time he graduated, he had mastered Pascal and Assembly, won national programming tournaments, and made full-fledged software 3D renders.

A NEW WAY TO TELL STORIES

During his first year at Brigham Young University, Mustard and his brother, Donald, had an experience that would change them forever. It all started at the local Blockbuster Video store when they rented the first-generation PlayStation console and a new video game, Final Fantasy VII. They only had enough money to rent both for three days, so they had to beat the game by the end of the third day. When they reached the first save point in the game, a message popped up telling them to insert a memory card. But they didn’t have a memory card, and they had spent their extra cash on the game and the system rental. Not only did they have to beat the game in three days, but they couldn’t turn off the console. Rising to the challenge, the brothers took turns playing so the game could keep going all day and all night.

They kept it up for two days straight. As they played, they realized this was a monumental leap forward in how stories could be told. The brothers began to envision how games could eventually surpass Hollywood as a storytelling medium. This was the future. After a frenzied forty-eight hours, they beat the game. But they couldn’t stop thinking about the experience. The brothers made a pact: Geremy would become the best programmer, Donald would become the best creative director, and one day they would build their own video game company. Then they sat down, outlined the skills they would need, and got to work. “We became great video game makers because we just wanted to tell awesome stories. We knew the way forward was games, and we committed to that path,” Mustard says.

WHAT TEXTBOOKS CAN’T TEACH

Geremy Mustard was called to serve a mission in Japan for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On his mission, Mustard learned how to work with people and to listen to them with the “intent to understand them, not to get caught up on words,” Mustard says. “Japanese is a complex language, and I quickly learned that you can’t get caught up in the nuances of words—you simply don’t know the words or culture well enough.” Instead, he focused on the underlying intent of what the other person was trying to convey.

“To be successful in life, in a career, in a family, you have to be able to communicate,” Mustard says. “I developed the idea of what I call ‘listening with charity’ to help me listen with the intent to understand rather than the intent to pick apart.” The idea of listening with charity goes beyond assumptions about another person and the specific words exchanged to consider the question “What is the person in front of me trying to communicate to me?” Mustard continues, “If you can focus on that question, you’ll be able to truly understand people, and they will then be more willing to understand you. If you ever want to work with a team—which you must do to maximize your own abilities—this is a critical skill. And I learned it on my mission.”

When Mustard finished his mission, his brother, Donald, was graduating from what is now the BYU Center for Animation. Donald got a job with a computer animation company and recommended that the company also hire his brother, Geremy. This job, which Mustard started after his mission and before he returned to BYU, helped him build on his existing art skills and learn how to animate professionally. He also started creating custom software for the company to make animation tasks easier. Using this software, he created a prototype game that he and Donald directed, and the game eventually became the award-winning Advent Rising. Mustard did all this while still taking night classes at BYU. Shortly after, the brothers cofounded Chair Entertainment to continue their game making journey.

CREATIVITY LOVES CONSTRAINTS

“Whenever we see new technology, we ask ourselves ‘How will this change the industry?’” says Mustard. At the end of 2004, Microsoft launched Xbox Live Arcade, where people could download games off the internet and play them right on their consoles. “We saw direct downloads and digital sales as a slow but inevitable death knell for brick-and-mortar game stores and wanted to be on the leading edge,” says Mustard. He and his team were in the midst of pitching a game to publishers but weren’t getting offers because they were an “unpublished team.” Mustard and his team decided to quickly publish something small on Live Arcade to prove to publishers that they could build something great. The team decided to come up with one hundred unique game concepts in three days. The parameters: the game had to be cool, had to show that the team was technologically proficient, and had to be under twenty-five megabytes (the download limit at the time). The team also had to be able to build the entire game in three months. The next day, everyone brought their first five game ideas. Then they began narrowing down the options.

“The ideas kind of dwindled. But after all the initial ideas were out, some really interesting and unique ideas started popping up,” Mustard says. “You’ll find this in general with creativity. When your well of creativity starts to dry up, you have to dig deep and figure out ‘What else is there?’ That’s when you start to put together ideas you may not have considered before and come up with some really amazing concepts.”

Finally, the team decided on the top three games. Two of those games would become Undertow and Shadow Complex. The third game was never made, but it did influence other games Mustard eventually created. The team had a working prototype of Undertow within two weeks and a complete game within three months. Microsoft loved the project and wanted to publish it but insisted it could run smoothly on old dial-up networking hardware, so Mustard optimized the entire networking layer of the Unreal Engine. Since Mustard was the only programmer at Chair, it took a few months longer than expected to complete the final version.

During this time, Mustard and his team were still pitching their big game idea to large publishers. Before long, they were in London with a ten million dollar offer from a major publisher in hand. That’s when the Mustard brothers realized they were at a crossroads. They could stick with their original big-game goal, take the ten million, grow their team to about one hundred people, and build the game for this publisher. Or they could keep their team small and keep building fun games to self-publish on Xbox Live Arcade. “We were having so much fun making Undertow, and we wanted to control our destiny,” Mustard says. “We wanted the freedom to create whatever we wanted and not be restricted by what a publisher might tell us to do.”

They decided to continue making smaller downloadable games. Undertow was downloaded and played by over 700,000 people and won numerous Editor’s Choice awards. The brothers also created Shadow Complex, an immensely popular game that sold 200,000 units in the first week alone. Then, staying on the bleeding edge of innovation, they created the Infinity Blade games, which redefined the capabilities of games on iOS and were played by over one hundred million people. In 2008, Chair Entertainment joined Epic Games. “I think we made a good decision turning down the big publishers,” says Mustard.

FAST-TRACK TO FORTNITE

“At Epic, we recognized a trend where the games that completely change the industry almost always come from mods and usually come once a decade,” says Mustard. The latest trend was battle royale games, where the last person standing wins. Epic felt this was the once in a decade game trend, so they decided to strike while it was hot. Rather than starting a game from scratch, which would take at least nine months to complete, they decided to use a game already in development. They had been prototyping a game called Fortnite, which had an original world layout and interesting building mechanics that would be unique in this genre of games. The president of the company gave the Mustard brothers the green light to move forward.

Mustard had to notify the Fortnite developers that the game was suddenly changing. One of the biggest challenges was the human aspect—letting team members know the goals were changing and re-forming the teams who then had to make drastic changes to the game and launch it as fast as possible. Three months later, Fortnite Battle Royale was launched, with the original game rebranded as Fortnite: Save the World. Many of the decisions they made in those three months shaped not only the game but the entire gaming industry.

A FOUNDATION FOR FORTNITE

Looking back, Fortnite seems like an obvious success. It is hard to imagine the game being designed any other way. However, many of the design ideas were unique. As a leader, Mustard had to make decisions that would drastically impact the game experience and the ultimate success of the game. “It’s hard when the impact of your decision isn’t exactly clear,” he says. “You have to trust your gut and gather as much data as you can. You try to think about people as much as you can and not just make a decision in a vacuum.”

Mustard and his team started by defining the guiding principles and philosophies they wanted behind Fortnite. A key philosophy was generosity. They decided Fortnite would be released for free so anyone could play, which meant the company would monetize smaller items in the game to make it profitable. Some video games sell items that give players an advantage over others in the game, but Mustard felt this would hurt the morale and fun of the game. “We knew if we sold items in the game that gave you power over the other players, the game would be less successful,” he says. “We wanted to make it so everyone could play the game for free and play everything in the game. We decided to sell only cosmetic items, things that have no value other than changing your appearance.”

The Fortnite team also came up with the idea to have a “Battle Pass” that could be bought outright or earned through gameplay. Once again, pricing became a major discussion point. An economist at Epic wanted to set the price at one hundred dollars, but Mustard and the team wanted it priced so a kid could pay for it. They settled on ten dollars, about the price of a meal at a fast-food restaurant. At the time, most games only had about a 2 percent conversion rate of players who purchased optional items like this. Based on how much time and money Epic had spent developing the game, the team members knew the game would be unprofitable if they only converted 2 percent of current players. However, they kept the price at ten dollars. “The day it came out, we ended up converting over 50 percent of our audience to paying, which is unheard of,” Mustard says.

The pass was so successful that it started being mimicked across the industry. “The power one person has to influence an entire company or an entire industry has just astounded me over and over again,” Mustard says. “It’s not even intentional. You just keep sticking up for what you think is right, fun, and innovative and keep pushing forward for something that feels better than another road. By doing that, you can change industries.”

One way the philosophy of positivity made Fortnite unique was through the multiplayer nature of the game. These types of games typically have “taunts”—little phrases or animations that are meant to be pejorative and to incense the other players. Mustard and his team wanted Fortnite to have a very friendly environment, so they decided to replace the traditional taunts with funny little dances. These dances had unexpected results. “We started seeing kids do the dances popularized by Fortnite in real life, everywhere. To this day, I see them pop up in movies and shows I’m watching. It’s surreal to see something I made have that level of influence on culture,” Mustard says. The guiding principles and philosophies ultimately led the team to create an astonishingly successful game. The launch exceeded expectations, and the number of players kept climbing. Six years later, Fortnite has hundreds of millions of registered players. At any given time, two to four million people are playing the game somewhere in the world. In fact, “over a billion people in the world have had some touchpoint with Fortnite. That’s over 10 percent of the entire world,” Mustard says.

A FEARLESS FUTURE

Mustard retired from Epic in 2022 and is now working on a new venture called FF20, which invests in new technologies with the hope of “fast forwarding” technology twenty years in fields like material science, health technologies, and energy.

Mustard’s career, including this new venture, has focused on creating the future—pushing the bounds of technology and finding the next big thing. New technologies like ChatGPT are already changing society, and that can be intimidating for many, including BYU students who are trying to plan careers in an evolving, unpredictable world. Mustard, however, has hope for the future. While artificial intelligence (AI) and other advancements will fundamentally change society and many jobs, Mustard sees the opportunity for BYU students and alumni to thrive. “The best thing is just to be excited. Be optimistic, not fearful. And always be curious,” Mustard shares. “See what the possibilities are with modern technology. The people who sample it, explore it, try it out, and are excited about it are the people who are going to be super successful in the next ten years.”

For Mustard, “Enter to learn; go forth to serve” is more than just BYU’s motto. It’s a guiding principle for work and for life. “The future is determined by those who create it,” says Mustard. “So what will you create? How will you intentionally influence the direction of the future to lead to the future you want?” Mustard continues, “If you can direct the path of your future, then you can go forth not only to serve but to build the technologies that we’ll need to build Zion.”

When we focus on exploring beyond what we perceive as our limitations, Mustard counsels, we can make a future that is abundant and happy. “Why not ask yourself, ‘How can I build a better world, the world that I want to live in?’” Mustard asks. “Everyone at BYU can do that. Go forth and do that.”