Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk might both be in contention for the crown of the richest person on the planet, but they are not the most influential person in tech. That crown will go to Tim Sweeney, the chief executive of Epic Games, maker of the wildly popular game Fortnite.
What makes Sweeney so important?
Well, Sweeney has dragged Apple, a $2 trillion company, to court over Cupertino’s decision to remove Fortnite from the App Store. Experts call this legal battle, which kicked off Monday in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, as the biggest anti-trust trial in the history of tech. If Epic wins, Apple might have to change the rules and guidelines of the App Store, which could shake its business model.
Epic Games vs Apple trial: Here are all the latest developments so far
Here are 11 little-known facts about Tim Sweeney, a billionaire and the tallest figure in the gaming industry.
1. Tim Sweeney, 51, was born in Maryland in a small town called Potomac. His father worked for the Defense Mapping Agency creating maps from satellite imagery. His mom raised him and two older brothers.
2. Although Sweeney was never able to finish his college degree, he always had an interest in programming and coding. As an inquisitive child, Sweeney would take apart radios and TVs to see how they functioned. Sweeney was also fascinated by video games. He was a big fan of Arcade gaming. Sweeney’s first home console was an Atari 2600, though he hated the “lousy machine.”
3. At age 9, Sweeney started learning to code on an Apple II computer. “I started out with an Apple II which was a good computer to learn with because it had absolutely no hardware-accelerated graphics or anything like that,” he told Gamasutra in an interview. “It was just a little 6502 processor, so you had to do absolutely everything yourself.”
4. Sweeney attended the University of Maryland as a mechanical engineering major. During the second year of college, he developed ZZT, a low-key adventure game, which was released as shareware in 1991. Notably, it wasn’t just an ASCII-based adventure. Every copy of the game has an in-game world editor for free. Sweeney created the game engine and the editor and then created the game in the early 90s. “The funny secret behind ZZT is it started out while writing a text editor. I’d used Turbo Pascal and other languages on the PC, but I didn’t like any of the editors that came with them, so I started writing my own,” according to an interview with Gamasutra.
5. Sweeney dropped out of college and moved back to his parent’s place. With $4000 in savings, at age 20, Sweeney founded Epic Games – then known as Potomac Computer Systems – in his parents’ basement.
6. Sweeney has seen many successes in his career, including the launch of the “Unreal” game engine that powers the world’s top games, the release of the first “Gears of War” game in 2006 (Microsoft bought the “Gears of War” franchise in 2014), and of course, “Fortnite” which became a hit upon its release in 2017. The hit battle royale game earned a staggering $9.1 billion in the first two years. Epic Games is also behind the “Infinity Blade”, one of the first mobile games to push graphic fidelity on mobile devices, especially on the iPhone.
7. When Sweeney turned 30, his company started to make a lot of cash. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2019, Sweeney revealed that he had a “Ferrari and a Lamborghini in the parking lot of my apartment…people who hadn’t met me thought I must be a drug dealer.”
8. Epic Games is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina. Earlier this year, the company reached a deal to acquire the 980,000 square foot and 87-acre Cary Towne Center for $95 million in the own of Cary. The cash-rich game developer plans to convert it into Epic Games’ global HQ by 2024.
9. The success of Fortnite changed the fortunes of Epic Games and Sweeney overnight. Today, Sweeney is worth $7.4 billion, and the company he started in his parents’ garage is valued at over $29 billion.
10. Not many know that Sweeney is passionate about forest conservation. He bought 193 acres in Alamance County in North Carolina to protect and preserve fortress land. In 2016, Sweeney also donated $15 million to protect 7,000 acres of forests in western North Carolina.
11. Sweeney likes to lead a simple life. “I am single, unmarried, no kids,” Sweeney told the Journal in 2019. “So I lead a fairly simple life. I love going off the trail and finding things that I think nobody’s ever seen before.” In his free time, Sweeney likes to programme or go hiking. Sweeney’s office attire consists of a T-shirt and cargo pants and his favorite food is Bojangles’ fried chicken.
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Published Thu, Aug 9 2018 11:41 AM EDTUpdated Wed, Sep 26 2018 12:02 PM EDT
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It has been exactly one year since video game developer Epic Games launched the massively popular "Battle Royale" mode of "Fortnite," the company's billion-dollar online multi-player survivor game.
After Epic Games debuted the "Battle Royale" version of "Fortnite" on September 26, 2017, the game's popularity surged to the point where it now has over 125 million players around the world. In addition to celebrating the one-year anniversary of battle royales in "Fortnite" on Wednesday, Sony also announced that it will enable cross-play for the game on its PlayStation 4 consoles (which means that PS4 players will be able to recover previous "Fortnite" games and in-game purchases from other consoles, like Xbox and Nintendo Switch).
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has come a long way from designing video games in his parents' house as a kid — the company he founded is making some of the world's most popular video games, from the "Gears of War" franchise to "Fortnite."
Sweeney turned his childhood hobby into a lucrative career. In 1991, as a 21-year-old college student, he started the video game company out of his parents' house in Potomac, Maryland. He was still living in a college dorm at the University of Maryland (where he said he did "not quite" finish a degree in mechanical engineering) and would drive about 30 minutes to his parents' house to use the personal computer he kept there, Sweeney said in a 2009 interview.
"I'd go back there on weekends," he explained.
Now, Sweeney's Epic Games is one of the gaming industry's hottest players, thanks to the massive success of "Fortnite," which launched on PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One and Mac in 2017.
Fortnite
Source: PlayStation
The game's popular (and free-to-play) "Battle Royale" mode — where 100 players per game battle it out to the death with a variety of weapons and tools at their disposal — was played by more than 78 million people in August alone.
At one point in February 2018, "Fortnite" had over 3.4 million people playing the game online at once. The game has become something of a cultural phenomenon to the point that celebrities like the rapper Drake and singer Joe Jonas have been known to spend their time playing with everyday gamers. In June, Epic Games hosted a Fortnite Celebrity Pro-Am where 50 professional gamers will team with celebs like NBA star Paul George for a shot at $3 million in prize money.
DRAKE TWEET
Despite being free to play, "Fortnite" has already pulled in more than $1 billion in revenue, including an estimated $318 million in May, according to research firm SuperData, thanks to in-game purchases by players who spend money on things like new costumes and tricked-out tools (like a pickaxe outfitted with glow-sticks). The game is on pace to gross roughly $2 billion this year alone.
But "Fortnite's" huge success is a stark contrast to the first game that Sweeney developed for Potomac Computer Systems (the original name for the company that later became Epic Games) in 1991. Called "ZZT," customers purchased that game by mailing a check to Sweeney's parents' house in Maryland and waiting for him to mail a copy of the game back to them on a computer disk.
The PC game that gave players the tools to basically create their own customized video games within the game. Sweeney first started working on "ZZT" as a teenager; in fact, he'd been programming computer games as a hobby since he was 11 years old.
As a kid, Sweeney would play classic video games like Nintendo's "Super Mario Bros." partly just to figure out how they worked, so he could build his own. "I would play games long enough to discover what games were doing and how they were doing it. And then I'd spend the rest of my time building," Sweeney told gaming site Kotaku in 2011.
Sweeney decided to launch his own company after finding himself hating a "succession of jobs," he told the gaming site Gamasutra in 2009, including mowing lawns and making minimum wage (about $4 per hour at the time) working at a hardware store. "That really sucked," Sweeney said.
But, those early jobs also helped bring out Sweeney's entrepreneurial side. After borrowing a tractor from his dad, Sweeney told Kotaku, he'd charge half the price of established landscaping companies to mow lawns in his Maryland neighborhood, thus undercutting his competition while making about $25 an hour.
"That's when I came to a really clear realization that, by trying harder, and striving to find cool business opportunities, you could do far, far better than the wage earners," Sweeney said. "At that point it became really clear to me that there were big opportunities in the world."
Sweeney first started Potomac Computer Systems with a plan to focus on computer consulting and making online databases for customers, but he told Gamasutra he "didn't get anywhere with it." He kept the name even after he pivoted to video games, and spent nine months building "ZZT," simply because he already had "business cards with 'Potomac Computer Systems.'"
"I was working on it part time between mowing lawns in the summer and going to class in the school year," Sweeney said in 2009.
When "ZZT" was first released in 1991, orders started coming in immediately and Sweeney said he eventually sold "several thousand" copies. In fact, Sweeney told Gamasutra that his father still gets "an order every few weeks" because he still lives in the same house in Potomac, Maryland.
"I was selling about three or four copies a day, which is a hundred dollars a day," Sweeney said. "It was income you could live on, actually."
Around this time, Sweeney decided he wanted to give his company a "serious name," so he renamed it "Epic MegaGames" as "kind of a scam to make it look like we were a big company."
"Of course, it was just one guy working from his parents' house," Sweeney told Gamasutra.
The initial success of "ZZT" gave Sweeney the confidence to turn his one-man operation into a full-time career, so he began working on what would become his next game: a PC adventure game called "Jill of the Jungle," which came out in 1992 and later became a trilogy of games.
Eventually, Sweeney shortened the company's name to Epic Games and moved out of his parents' house. In 1999, the company moved to its current location in Cary, North Carolina, where Epic Games currently employs more than 700 people.
The first installment of "Gears of War" was released in 2006 and the game franchise, which includes more than half a dozen titles, is estimated to have sold more than 22 million units and generated over $1 billion in revenue. Microsoft bought that franchise for an undisclosed amount in 2014, a deal that came a year after Chinese tech company Tencent paid $330 million for a 40 percent stake in Epic Games, in 2013.
Now, "Fortnite's" popularity is already inspiring other game-makers, like Electronic Arts, to try to copy the success of "Fortnite." This, even after Epic Games recently had to fend off a copyright lawsuit, filed in May, alleging that its game too closely mirrors one of its rivals: "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds." (Sweeney said the two games are "complimentary" and that "if they're two great games, people will play both," while the developer of "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds," PUBG Corp., dropped the lawsuit in June.)
Meanwhile, Sweeney and Epic Games continue to look ahead with plans to build on the popularity of "Fortnite." That includes a leap into the esports market with an ongoing "Fortnite" tournament for which Epic Games has promised to provide $100 million in total prizes — the largest-ever prize pool for an esports tournament.
This article was originally published on June 12 and it was updated on September 26, 2018.
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