Epic’s Fortnite for an “entirely different”, “more casual” market

Zombie Apocalypse Starter Kit

Tarryn van der BylJanuary 23, 2012

What’s much less hardcore than Gears of War? That would be Epic Games‘ next project, the scavengin’, buildin’, zombie holocaustin’ Fortnite.

“We have announced a new game Fortnite for an entirely different audience, more casual,” Epic overlord Tim Sweeney told VentureBeat. “It appeals to a wider audience than a hardcore game like Gears of War. We are branching out, but we tie it all together with AAA production values.”

The co-op, Minecrafty survival game was officially debuted at the Spike TV VGAs in December 2011, although not much else is known about it for the moment.

“Mike Capps [Epic president] decided at one point that we were finishing Gears of War 3 and we had a whole lot of people available. We weren’t ready to ramp up our next AAA project yet,” he explained.

“So we held an internal ‘game jam’ inside Epic. Everybody in the company who was available divided up into teams and spent a week creating prototypes. We got a bunch of different prototypes and proposals out of it, with an incredible amount of variety. Fortnite arose through that process. And it’s a really cool game to work on.”

Fortnite doesn’t have a launch date or even launch platforms yet, but it’s definitely a no dudebro zone.