William Zachary Reed loved building elaborate castles throughout Fortnite's grassy knolls. The zany mechanics that anchored the colorful battle royale were second to none, until giant robot mecha suits spoiled his fun whenever he would jump into a match. Those suits, aptly named BRUTE, gave two players all the firepower, health, and mobility needed to melt Reed's health bar in seconds.
At that point in early 2019, it was clear that the battle royale’s game mechanics had gotten a little too zany for him, and that was long before IP crossovers gave Dragon Ball Z's Goku a shotgun and taught Marvel's Moon Knight to floss.
“I despised them,” says Reed, who goes by the name KingYoshi online. Instead of waiting for the mechs to get phased out with Fortnite's seasonal cycle, he turned to a different part of the game. “Fortnite Creative had come out not too long before that, so I just started messing around in there.”
More than three years later, Reed hardly plays the battle royale mode anymore. He spends his days refining his own creations, including a Peach's Castle from Super Mario 64 and Raccoon City's police station from Resident Evil 2—all within Fortnite Creative.
Players like Reed don't jump out of a bus and onto a mysterious island anymore. They spend dozens of hours a week prodding and tweaking different parts of their own islands in Fortnite Creative. Thousands of maps, from single-player horror adventures to rounds of hide-and-seek played in a janky version of Night City from Cyberpunk 2077, have transformed Fortnite into a marketplace of creativity that rivals Minecraft and Roblox.
Epic Games, with a bit of strategic prowess, lucked out by being one of the earliest studios to cash in on the battle royale craze. The game mode is still incredibly popular—but it's also commonplace in the game industry. Call of Duty: Warzone, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, and other games fill a crowded genre.
