Phil Rampulla ’97, the former head of brand at Epic Games, had one of the biggest moments of his career at a time when many people’s lives had ground to a halt. It was April 2020, just over a month into the COVID-19 pandemic. Rampulla was working primarily on Fortnite, a free-to-play, internet-based, downloadable video game in which groups of up to 100 players descend onto an island and fight until only one player or team remains.
By that time, Fortnite had become wildly popular, with more than 250 million total users. Many of them were suddenly spending a lot of time at home (and online). Rampulla and his team had engineered an in-game concert by the electronic music artist Marshmello in 2019, so when the music festival Coachella was cancelled due to the pandemic, they were able to move quickly to produce a virtual concert with one of the scheduled headliners, rapper Travis Scott.
Rampulla with Travis Scott
“It was something that brought a lot of people together under really not great circumstances,” says Rampulla, with 12 to 13 million players watching live from inside the game as Scott performed virtually all over the island — first as a giant, then as a cyborg, then underwater. “[Millions of people] watching a thing that you were a part of crafting is a really once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was really about the fact that we shipped out seven to 10 minutes of joy to people who were in a very un-joyous world.”
Rampulla, who entered Muhlenberg as a pre-med natural science major, never expected to be crafting anything as a career. His father was a doctor, and that shaped Rampulla’s perception of what it meant to work for a living. “I’d never really thought of creative or art as a profession,” he says. “It was always just a hobby and my passion, but I never thought I would actually have a successful job in a creative field.”
College helped shift that perception. He attended a career seminar as a sophomore and heard from an alum who was a medical illustrator — a path that would combine his love for art and science. He dropped the pre-med designation, added an art minor, and after graduation, began a master’s program in medical illustration at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There, he learned to use Adobe Photoshop and to create 3D models and animations. After completing the program, he interned with a full-time medical illustrator — and hated it.
“I’d never really thought of creative or art as a profession. It was always just a hobby and my passion, but I never thought I would actually have a successful job in a creative field.”
“I was insanely bored,” he says. “I kind of panicked, like, ‘What am I going to do with my life? Because I don’t want to just sit here and draw spleens every day.’”
Luckily, the internet was blossoming, and companies needed people familiar with Photoshop and 3D modeling and animation to create content for websites and online advertisers. Rampulla worked for several design agencies before he and a partner launched their own, Material Group, in Chicago in 2009. They were doing things like designing mobile apps for Starbucks that animated their popular holiday cups in an era when smartphones were the exception and not the rule. After three years, a larger agency acquired the company, and Rampulla stayed on for a year before leaving to do independent consulting.
Listen to a more extensive interview on the alumni podcast 2400 Chew.
During that time, Rampulla saw a creative director opening at Epic. He flew to its Cary, North Carolina, headquarters for an interview and felt the same sense of home he had when he visited Muhlenberg. And the modern video game medium — in which the world can be constantly changing, players can be connected virtually, and the game doesn’t need to have a specific endpoint — felt ripe with possibility for his creative mind.
Rampulla started at Epic in April 2015, about halfway through the development process for the first iteration of Fortnite. By the end of 2017, Fortnite had taken over many of his working hours. In his role, he would collaborate with colleagues to envision where to take the storyline of the game next. He and his colleagues were behind the “black hole” that appeared to replace the game in 2019, causing gamers to freak out and crash both Reddit and game-streaming service Twitch as they looked for answers. (Later, it became clear that the black hole marked the transition between the first and second chapters of the game.) Rampulla also oversaw in-game events like the aforementioned concerts as well as brand partnerships. For example, he worked on partnerships with the Netflix show “Stranger Things,” the “John Wick” series of movies, and the NFL over the course of his time at Epic.
After an intense decade with Epic — most of which was all Fortnite, all the time — Rampulla retired from his role last July. “Getting so much exposure to different genres of creative entertainment was really helpful for me. Each thing built on itself, which led me to eventually land here,” he says. “What I’m trying to find is that perfect trifecta of things that I’m really passionate about and good at, things that the world needs, and giving back. My purpose now is to find the next purpose.”
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