“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 we need to do a battle royale. “It was Tim Sweeney and Paul Meegan, who was the president of Epic at the time, Kim Libreri, Epic’s CTO,” said Mustard. Mustard says he remembered thinking that it “felt like a really unique take on: How do you bring lots of people into a thing?” And right before the official launch of Fortnite, during a car ride in mid-2017, Mustard and Epic decided the company needed its own battle royale. Around 2017, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds and its 100-player matches were becoming the biggest thing on Steam. Mustard says that battle royales first caught his eye when they started popping up in Minecraft. This was during a time when the company was in a weird place-having sold Gears of War and announced Fortnite before going radio silent-and needed to “shake something up.” Minecraft, PUBG, and a random bus influenced Fortnite

In 2016, Mustard was promoted to Epic’s chief creative officer. During a recent chat with Game File’s Stephen Totilo, Mustard revealed a lot of information on how they got Batman, John Wick, and Superman into one game, the struggle to grow Fortnite while still doing big events, and how they even decided to add a battle royale mode to the survival shooter in the first place. He had helped grow Epic’s Fortnite into one of the biggest games on the planet, bringing in numerous crossover characters and celebrities to the online shooter’s metaverse. In September 2023, after 15 years at Epic, Mustard announced he was leaving to work on new projects.

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