Ever since its release way back in 2017, Fortnite has emerged as arguably the biggest and most crucial Battle-Royale game that has come out thus far. The Epic Games offering has managed to maintain its growth over the years, boasting a stellar 500 million users as of 2024.
While the game in itself was initially released as Fortnite: Save the World, it was Epic Games’ former chief creative officer, Donald Mustard, who was effectively the brainchild behind the franchise. Mustard left his role in September 2023, but his stellar ideas allowed Fortnite to develop into a franchise that has, to date, generated $26 billion for Epic Games.
As it turns out, Mustard first came up with the design document for the landmark project in the back of an Uber, which he was sharing with three other top executives from Epic Games.
Donald Mustard explains how he came up with Fortnite: Battle Royale
As it turned out, Fortnite: Save the World was initially released in July 2017. However, this was around the same time that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds took the gaming world by a storm, leading to Mustard and company coming up with their own plans.
During a recent interview with Game Files’ Stephen Totilo, Mustard revealed that the group had already been toying with the idea of a Battle Royale:
It was Tim Sweeney and Paul Meegan, who was the president of Epic at the time, [and] Kim Libreri, Epic’s CTO. The four of us were in the back of an Uber in California, headed to a meeting at Disney…We were already toying with this [idea that] we need to do a battle royale. We should do this. And what if we did it in Fortnite?
He added:
And so, in that car, we decided. We’re like: ‘We’re doing it, we’re going to re-task the team, we’re going to put it in Fortnite, we’re going to make a battle royale.’
This led the group to finalize their decision to come up with a Battle Royale mode for Fortnite. Of course, while it eventually led to the game as we know it today, it immediately led to Mustard realizing the extent of the work they had on their hands.
Donald Mustard admits Fortnite: Battle Royale took inspiration from PUBG
The cab journey did not merely lead to the Epic Games executives fine-tuning their plans. It also led to Mustard realizing how they needed a ‘design document’ within three hours, as he immediately set to work. The 47-year-old revealed that he looked at his immediate surroundings for inspiration to create the one-page document:
A school bus is going by us in traffic, and I’m like: Players are going to be on a bus in the sky and we’re going to jump out of it.
While the idea in itself was simple, it led to an imagery that has been carried over in Fortnite ever since, in the sense that Battle Royale players get flown into the map in a school bus, even today. Regardless, even Mustard’s immediate surroundings were not the only place he took ideas from, as he effectively admitted to taking inspiration from PUBG as well, with respect to the overall game.
When asked about the allegations against Fortnite that it straight up copied PUBG, Mustard claimed this was not something exclusive to his game:
My philosophy is: All video games are all of us just riffing off each other. This, to me, is just an evolution of Quake.
Hence, rather than him finding a fault with copying some elements of PUBG, Mustard claimed that the entire gaming industry operates on such processes, where they take elements of other games to create their own, unique product.
