Q&A with PlayerUnknown: Why Fortnite and Similar Games Seem like Passing Trends

Brandon Greene, known to gamers simply as PlayerUnknown, hardly needs much of an introduction, but we’ll do it anyway on the off-chance you’ve been under a rock these past few years. Once a photographer and freelance web designer, PlayerUnknown was arguably responsible for spawning the Battle Royale genre when he started modding DayZ (itself an Arma 2 mod) to add a last-man-standing mode. His first work was DayZ: Battle Royale, inspired by the Japanese movie Battle Royale.

Later in 2013, Greene moved to the newly launched Arma 3 and released another mod called PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale. This mod introduced for the first time the now ubiquitous feature of dropping into the map via airplane. The success of his Battle Royale mods caused professional game studios to take notice of Greene. The first one to do so was Sony Online Entertainment, which hired him to create a Battle Royale mode for its zombie survival game H1Z1. The mode was called H1Z1: King of the Kill. But it was with Krafton (then still called Bluehole Ginno Games) that his vision was finally realized.

CEO Chang-han Kim brought him to South Korea as Creative Director for a new project that would ultimately become PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or, as it is more commonly known, PUBG. The rest, as they say, is history. The game launched in late 2017, literally taking the industry by storm and establishing Battle Royale as the biggest gaming trend. According to estimates, it is the best-selling game ever released on PC with 42 million units, and on Xbox One with 9 million units. Across all platforms, it is estimated to be the fifth best-selling game of all time with 75 million units, behind only Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V, Wii Sports (which was bundled into the Wii console), and Mario Kart 8/Deluxe. On Steam, PUBG still retains the top spot in the all-time concurrency peak chart with 3.2 million users playing at the same time.

Over time, the game’s immense popularity diminished in favor of Epic’s Fortnite. However, PlayerUnknown had left his mark and was about to move on to his next and even more ambitious project. In early 2019, he relocated to Amsterdam to establish a new studio called PUBG Special Projects, revealing they had a blank slate to explore new concepts with no strict deadline to follow. Later that year, Greene began sharing that he wanted to create a massively big world, way beyond current standards, in a game called Prologue.

We didn’t hear from him for a couple of years until it was announced that the studio had been spun off into the independent PlayerUnknown Productions, with only a minority stake from Krafton. Later in 2021, Greene revealed some adjustments to the plan: Prologue would be a tech demo for a subsequent planet-sized game called Artemis. That wasn’t the end of the changes to the plan. A couple of months ago, the studio said it had switched to a three-game plan that started with Preface: Undiscovered World, a free tech demo of the Melba engine now available on Steam.

Prologue: Go Wayback! (also available for wishlisting on Valve’s platform) would instead be a single player survival game where players would explore a detailed world where emergent systems influence gameplay, facing unpredictable weather events and ever-changing landscapes as they attempt to escape the untamed wilderness. Finally, the third and final game that should realize PlayerUnknown’s vision is codenamed Artemis, a massive multiplayer sandbox game that is, however, still far away, given that the updated plan has a 10-year roadmap.

I recently had the opportunity to have a nice, long conversation with Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene himself, where he opened up to discuss the games, the studio’s plans, and his view of the metaverse, which is starkly different from others we’ve seen so far in the industry. You can read the full transcript of our chat below.