Crafting Games Beyond Boundaries, Redefining Possibilities
About
our leaders
In our experience, a certain set of personality types tended to dominate leadership roles in our industry. The ability to project a viewpoint in a charismatic way in a live setting was an essential criteria to leadership. Intuitive, on-the-spot reasoning and debate ability were also highly prized. The creative process was best driven by people who could maintain a veneer of mastery over it at all times. Owning the room, as it were.
However, we value the…
Quiet types. Deliberative types. Careful types.
All disfavored in a traditional leadership structure. Misfits.
We’re Fortis.
We build games where you belong…
…made by people who want to belong.
Meet our founders
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Steven Chiang
President
Steven Chiang is the President of Fortis and focuses on building the leadership culture and getting our games shipped. Raised amidst the cornfields of Iowa, he first found his way to games and coding with the help of an Apple IIGS and mail-order programming cards. This childhood experience was then combined with childhood friends to form Tiburon Entertainment, which is now a lynchpin of the EA SPORTS ecosystem as the makers of the Madden NFL series. He rose to the position of SVP at EA before disembarking on a magical journey throughout the universe, leaving success in his wake at Zynga and Warner Brothers Games. Having reached the towering heights, Steve grew indifferent and listless, finding no joy even in his perpetual Clash of Clans battles. He realized, during a moment of quiet meditation, that to go forward, he must go backward. He must do it all again. And so Fortis is here, a brazen attempt to recapture the blossom of his youth by once again founding a company in pursuit of the grand dream of building industry defining entertainment.
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Shawn Foust
Chief Operating Officer
Shawn is the COO of Fortis and focuses on product, publishing, community, and corporate development. He’s managed to work in games for over a decade, often resorting to founding companies so he has a place to work). Throughout that career, he’s been a lawyer, a business developer, a game designer, a producer, a founder, an executive, and a wandering sage (consultant of dubious value). He’s won a few, he’s lost a few. Through all of those ups and downs, he remains passionate about games as a creative medium and a way to bring people together. Fortis, as a global, remote company working in the design lane – is an attempt to follow that passion at a grand scale.
In his free time, he writes blogs and biographies about himself in the third person, which isn’t weird at all.
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Calvin Lau
Chief Product Officer
Calvin is the Chief Product Officer of Fortis and focuses on building the creative culture within the company. He began his career in entertainment as an unpaid model for a SAT Prep Company before making the eventual transition into game design and product management. Reclusive by nature, Fortis has forced him out of shell, resulting in multiple well-regarded updates to his LinkedIn profile as well as a number of greenlit games helmed by fantastic and thoughtful game makers. He didn’t become immersed in games until college, which led to a superlative Warcraft III record and a questionable academic one. However, once the passion attached, it never diminished, and he dedicated his time to studying systems of human interaction and building worlds around those systems – often to great success.
He’s excited about Fortis because it represents an opportunity to build a community of creative people driven to push the boundaries of these systems and the worlds that contain them.