The last copy of ZZT went out in November 2013, and the man who mailed it was Tim Sweeney's father. For years Paul Sweeney had filled orders for his son's first game from the family home in Potomac, Maryland.
Sweeney was the youngest of three brothers. His father worked for the Defense Mapping Agency and gave him an IBM PC/AT around the time he started college. An older brother ran a startup in California, where Sweeney at eleven spent a week learning BASIC. Back home he taught himself on the family Apple II, and he later estimated more than 10,000 hours of practice between eleven and fifteen. He said he took apart a lawnmower at five or six. He finished several games as a teenager and showed none of them to anyone. He also mowed lawns for wealthy neighbours at half the price of the professionals.
The company that would make Fortnite began as his parents' home consulting business, Potomac Computer Systems, revived to sell one game.
At the University of Maryland he studied mechanical engineering, and in 1990 he built a text editor in Pascal that picked up game-like elements and became ZZT. He wrote to Scott Miller of Apogee to ask how shareware worked. ZZT came out on January 15, 1991.
Here is the part almost nobody knows. The company that would make Fortnite began as his parents' home consulting business, Potomac Computer Systems, revived to sell one game. Orders came to the house. Within months, one account says by October 1991, he renamed it Epic MegaGames to sound like a big, successful company. It was one young man in a family house. The word Mega stayed until 1999, when the company moved to Cary, North Carolina, and stopped pretending to be big.
Sales reached roughly $100 a day, enough that he left Maryland one credit short of a degree. Mark Rein came on as a partner, and Cliff Bleszinski joined at 17. Unreal Engine and Gears of War in 2006 built the business, and Tencent paid $330 million for about 40 percent in 2012.
Fortnite launched as a free battle royale in September 2017 and passed 125 million players by May 2018. In August 2020 Epic offered a cheaper in-game price that bypassed Apple's and Google's payments, both removed the game, and Epic sued. The Epic Games Store returned to iOS in April 2025. In March 2026 Epic announced more than 1,000 layoffs as Fortnite engagement fell.
The first sale tells you the rest. A hundred dollars a day, packed and mailed by a father who kept doing it for twenty-odd years, was enough proof to put a name on the door that was bigger than the room.