Donald Mustard, head of Fortnite’s story, is leaving Epic and retiring

theverge.com:

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Donald Mustard ran a successful studio that showed what the Xbox and iPhone were capable of. Then, he became the face of one of the biggest and boldest storytelling experiments in history, to borrow a phrase, with Fortnite’s massive metaverse.

Now, he’s done: Mustard, chief creative officer at Epic Games, says he’s retiring this month.

“I’m excited to spend time with my wife and family and am forever grateful for @TimSweeneyEpic and the Epic Games family,” he writes.

I will always remember Mustard best for Shadow Complex, one of the best Metroidvania games ever made, which helped prove out the market for digital-only titles when it arrived on the Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Arcade platform in 2009. It broke the platform’s sales records at the time, selling 200,000 copies in a week. His studio, Chair Entertainment, founded by members of the Advent Rising development team, also brought the award-winning Undertow to Xbox Live Arcade in 2007.

Mustard was both the creative and technical director on Shadow Complex, though many Epic Games employees are listed in the credits, too — Epic bought Chair in 2008, a year earlier.

By 2010, Mustard had switched from Xbox to the iPhone instead. Epic Games had just helped legitimatize iOS as a gaming platform with its then-incredible Epic Citadel tech demo. Mustard’s Chair turned it into Infinity Blade, a sword-swinging finger-flicking series that served as Apple’s go-to demo for the iPhone’s graphical chops for years afterward — despite originally being conceived as a Microsoft Kinect title you’d play with your arms.