Friday 'Nite: Fortnite's Most Unlikely Inspiration Is This Popular Science Book
In last week's Friday 'Nite, my weekly Fortnite lore deep dive, I took a look at how much shared DNA there is between Epic's gargantuan battle royale game and the former zeitgeist-dominating TV series Lost. The conclusion, which hopefully I made obvious, is that higher-ups within Epic's storytelling department are Lost fans. In particular, it seems like Donald Mustard, the chief creative officer at Epic and de facto Fortnite lore-bible scribe, clearly nerded out for the show a decade ago, like so many of us did.
But Mustard is multifaceted, and this week I want to highlight another of his apparent influences, even as this one seems all the more unlikely for a game that is made up, in no small part, of teenagers buying avatars of their favorite Marvel superheroes.
In 2011, professor and historian Yuval Noah Harari published what would go on to become his career-defining work: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. A nearly 500-page primer on our species from its bloody beginnings to the modern day, the text went on to become a bestseller. To this day, it remains atop many public figures' recommended reading list, and Harari's subsequent books, Homo Deus and Lessons For The 21st Century, have become bestsellers of their own.
What does this have to do with Fortnite? Well, Mustard, famous for tweeting vague teases to Fortnite's story and future events, is clearly a fan.
Incompatible viewpoints and contradicting beliefs are the cognitive dissonance that fuel the creativity, myth making, and invention vital to humankind and our continued existence. And our ability to conceive, and believe, in Imagined Orders our ultimate evolutionary superpower.
What Mustard is referring to in his somewhat cryptic tweet seems to be the exact
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