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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Fortnite's pivot from failed co-op zombie game to... well, this... is incredible.

I would love to have experienced that office environment over that year. I can only imagine that the pivot was a "well, we already have most of the game. What can do we do with it?" hail Mary as they considered what to do short of closure.

I may also be misremembering how dire their situation was. But I thought it was quite dire.

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I heard battle royale mode was added in a hack week by developers, but I don’t know the whole story

Fortnite may have been dire as a product, but Epic was surely not in any kind of trouble as a company.

It's really odd to watch people see them as "the Fortnite company" and ignore/discount the Unreal engine, etc.

I actually see them as the ZZT company.

Oh man, for some reason Epic Games and Epic MegaGames were distinct in my head. Two companies, one which made ZZT, Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit, and the other which starts with Unreal.

I loved ZZT back in the day.

> Jazz Jackrabbit

Wow that's a name I haven't heard in ages. Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was one of my favourite games growing up.

I learned quite a bit from the simple message passing in ZZT-OOP as well as some about timing and inserting new information into logic loops. Most of my programs were closer to what would be done in Twine today, which makes me optimistic about the generation of future programmers that framework is creating.

There's a ton of ZZT mods out in the world BTW. It's kind of amazing what was possible with such a limited environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZU4wR86h1E

Ha, same. That’s always the first thing that comes to mind.

I was programming before ZZT, but it definitely solidified some things in my head, despite its limitations.

It just completely skips my mind that Epic has more going on for them than games. Not that I've really tried to understand their business units or offering.

The situation for Fortnite as it was may have been dire, but as a company I imagine UE4 licensing would have kept them in business at the very least.

After Unreal Tournament 3 and Unreal Tournament 4 ( still pre-alpha) you could probably extend that 'dire' 'office environment..' to quite a few years.

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