The Key to em Fortnite /em 's Success

The following article is a written adaptation of an episode of Thrilling Tales of Modern Capitalism, Slate's new podcast about companies in the news and how they got there. The story of Epic Games begins with a programming prodigy named Tim Sweeney. When he was still in elementary school, Sweeney received an Apple II computer as a gift from his older brother. He almost immediately started programming very simple games on that computer, and then he began to test those games out by letting other kids play them while he watched. "He was quite savvy for a teenager," says Simon Parkin, a writer who covers the video game industry, "because he knew that if he wanted his games to be successful, he needed to make sure that players of different abilities could get into them and understand what they were doing. So he would invite all the kids from the local neighborhood over to come and play his games that he was designing, and he would watch them while they were playing and make adjustments or take notes based on if they got confused or if they got stuck in a certain bit, and then he'd go away and adjust the game accordingly."