MASON LONG · STAR CHARTS
N 43° 22' · W 124° 13'
Play Portfolio instead of Read? Walk the career timeline as a playable RPG questline — 15 quests, turn them in, claim the rewards. ▶ Play
Transmission · 2026.05 Hello, my name is

Mason
Long

Gameplay designer & studio lead. Thirteen years in competitive games, AAA live service, and indie.

Open to lead or director gameplay design roles. Also considering select senior IC positions in combat and encounter design or select industries. Action RPGs and shooters preferred but not required. Remote-first; open to relocation with assistance for the right role.

ClassGameplay Lead RegionCoos Bay, OR SeekingLead · Director · Select Sr. Design and Sr. PM roles
Mason Long
Mason LongP1
Stage 00 · Mission Brief 30-Second Read
13yrCareer across pro esports, AAA, indie
6yrEpic Games on Fortnite Battle Royale
350M+Lifetime registered Fortnite players
78MPeak monthly active players
12M+MrBeast $1M Tournament participants
$1MPrize pool · design-led rules & scoring
4Vendor studios led across UEFN platform
9Direct reports mentored, multiple promoted
Marquee: Impostors· MrBeast $1M· Unvaulting Event· UEFN Platform
About this player

Hello, my name is Mason Long! I am a Gameplay designer and design lead in Coos Bay, Oregon. I have Thirteen years of experience across pro esports, AAA live service, and indie.

I spent six years at Epic Games on Fortnite Battle Royale. I joined at the very start of development on the early team that built the game; Led the Balance team from launch through Chapter 2, built the hotfix framework that ran the game for five years, and led design on Impostors, the MrBeast $1M Tournament, and the Unvaulting Event. Helped lead UEFN tooling with vendor studios across four countries.

Before Epic, I was a broadcast producer at ESL for Blizzard, Ubisoft, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Before that, I was a professional League of Legends coach at CLG, Cloud9, and TSM.

In 2024 I founded Mythic Maker Studios with former Fortnite peers. We closed it in early 2026. The current funding ecosystem is unforgiving.

Looking for lead or director gameplay design roles, or select senior IC positions in combat and encounter design or simulation spaces. Remote-first but certainly open to relocation for the right role and with assistance.

Stage 01 Loadout & Capabilities
Cross-disciplinary
01Design

Systems & Gameplay

Balance, encounter design, scoring & rules, hotfix & live-ops cadence, telemetry-driven iteration, vault & meta management, social-deduction systems, modes & LTMs.

02Delivery

Production & PM

Roadmap ownership, cross-functional coordination, KPI & OKR frameworks, release management, vendor delivery management, multi-million-dollar budget ownership.

03Leadership

Teams & Mentorship

Led 20-30 person cross-disciplinary teams. Direct reports promoted on cadence. Hiring, calibration, postmortems, and cross-studio leads alignment.

04Tools

Engines & Pipelines

UE4 / UE5, Verse / UEFN, Blueprint, hotfix tooling, Jira, Confluence, Perforce, telemetry stacks, broadcast pipelines, vendor pipelines.

Stage 02 My Designs
Deep dives · craft on display

These deep dives show how the call got made, not just what shipped.

Deep Dive 01 Live service · 6 years

Fortnite Battle Royale

Balance leadership · the hotfix framework · Impostors · MrBeast $1M · the Unvaulting · UEFN.

Six highlights, each as problem → goal → hard call → concrete move → surprise.

Open the deep dive
Stage 03 Relevant Work
2013 → Present
01 Epic Games

Fortnite Battle Royale

Epic Games · 2017 to 2023 · 6 years

Lead Balance & Live Systems Designer → Gameplay/Systems Designer II/III → Gameplay Design Lead

Joined at the very start of development as one of the early team members that built the game. Owned balance and live-systems design from the beginning. Grew into design lead roles on the marquee launches that defined the era.

Full breakdown in Deep Dive 01. The short version:

Highlights
  • Impostors. Design lead on the social-deduction mode. Owned loop, roles, win conditions, post-launch tuning.
  • MrBeast $1M Tournament. Design lead on rules, scoring, tiebreak. 12M+ participants, single undisputed winner.
  • Unvaulting Event (Season 8). Core gameplay elements of the live event. Real-time interaction at concert-scale concurrency.
  • Hotfix system. Built the tooling that ran weekly balance changes from 2017 through 2022.
  • UEFN & UGC platform. Led delivery across vendor studios in four countries.
  • Mentorship. 20-30 person cross-disciplinary teams. Reports promoted on cadence.
Span
2017 to 2023 · six years
Scale
350M+ lifetime · 78M peak monthly · top three concurrent games on the planet
Press
Newsweek · Unvaulting
02 Founder

Mythic Maker Studios

Founder & Design Director · 2024 to 2025

Independent studio · senior team · two-year run

Co-founded with former Fortnite peers. Stood up a senior team, ran a publisher and investor process, closed the studio cleanly in early 2026 when funding didn't come through. The current funding ecosystem is unforgiving. We did the work. The capital didn't show up.

Specifics are under NDA. What's portable is the leadership work: hiring, financial stewardship, fundraising, and running a small senior team through a hard market.

Portable experience
  • Founding & team. Co-founders, early engineering, art, and design hires. Senior team of former AAA peers.
  • Fundraising. Pitch deck, financial model, publisher and investor conversations across 2025.
  • Wind-down. Closed cleanly. Paid everyone. Kept relationships intact.
03 Epic Games

UEFN & Worlds Platform

Epic Games · 2022 to 2023

Helped lead delivery across contract vendor studios

Helped lead delivery on UEFN/Worlds with contract vendor studios in four countries. Tooling, content, review pipelines, and bringing external partners into Epic's quality, performance, and player-safety standards.

What it took
  • Cross-studio delivery. Aligning four vendors on milestones, review gates, and Epic quality bars.
  • Multi-million dollar budget ownership. Scoping, approvals, burn against milestones.
  • Tooling & standards. Defined what "ready for Fortnite" meant for external creators.
04 Esports

ESL Broadcast

ESL Gaming · 2015 to 2017

Broadcast producer · Blizzard · Ubisoft · Microsoft · Nintendo

Produced live esports broadcasts for Blizzard, Ubisoft, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Tournament weekends, championship finals, qualifiers, live event production across multiple titles and regions.

Translation to design
  • Live-show pressure. Two-camera, ten-camera, in-arena. Same skill as live-service shipping: recover from anything, in real time, on schedule.
  • Audience attention. Pacing a broadcast taught me what pacing means in games, modes, and events.
  • Publisher relationships. Worked first-party on visibility, brand, audience growth.
05 Pro Esports

LoL Coaching

CLG · Cloud9 · TSM · 2013 to 2015

Strategy & analyst coach · North American LCS

Coached League of Legends teams in the NA LCS: CLG, Cloud9, TSM. Strategy prep, draft and pick-ban, opponent scouting, in-game macro coaching across three seasons.

Translation to design
  • Player psychology. At pro level, the win condition is mental as much as mechanical. Stayed with me through Balance and live events.
  • System-state reading. Drafting in LoL is reading a meta-state in real time. Same skill as reading a live game's economy and intervening with the right hotfix.
  • Coaching. Direct foundation for the mentorship work at Epic.
Stage 04 · Future-facing craft

Future Questlines

Beyond traditional game design, these are spaces where I'm excited to apply systems thinking, player psychology, live experience design, and interactive storytelling. Order does not represent priority; all are interesting spaces to me

Not a complete list. These are areas of great professional interest, not just skill-transfer bets. I do not have direct, immediate professional experience in all of them yet, but the craft skills from my career feel highly transferable.

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Stage 05 · Continue? Open Comms
Email
longmason@hotmail.com
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/masonalanlong
Location
Coos Bay, Oregon · Remote-first · Open to relocation with assistance for the right role
Time zone
Pacific (UTC-8 / -7)
Status
Open to lead or director gameplay design roles. Also considering select senior IC positions in combat and encounter design and select industries. Action RPGs and shooters preferred but not required.

References, redacted deep dives, and direct-report names available on request.