The gaming of the past 10 years is primarily shaped by the genre of the “Battle Royale”. Games like H1Z1, PUBG, Apex Legends, Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone inspired millions of players and earned billions of US dollars. And that depends on a man who was not in good shape in 2013.
Which Irish is it about? In 2013 the Irishman Brendan Greene was quite at the end. The man was 37, freshly divorced and as good as center – he was also stuck in Brazil and didn’t have enough money to get home.
Greene moved to Brazil in the early 1930s and wanted to build a life with his wife. But everything went wrong, the marriage failed. Greene struggled as a wedding photographer and designed on the side. He earned about $ 300 a month, as an economic page in 2019 reported (via CNBC).
His only goal at the time was to somehow come back home. But the money for the flight ticket was missing. He hung in his bedroom, worked a bit and gambled video games because he lacked the money for others, but he was actually not a big gamer.
PUBG maker Brendan Green introduces his new game in the video
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A Japanese film inspired him to invent a mode for shooters
How did he find the gaming: Because he was designing websites, Greene knew something about programming and he had gambled a little as a child and teenager, sometimes Black Hawk Down on PlayStation 2, but he was actually not a real gamer.
Nevertheless, he now entered the world of “mods” in Brazil. These are modifications for video games made by the players themselves.
He liked the Japanese film “Battle Royale” (2000): In the parody of the relentless Japanese school system, teenagers are kidnapped to an island, they are given a random weapon or an object, a frying pan or a machine gun, and lets them fight against each other in the wilderness.
In the West, a concept similar to Battle Royale has become known through the later filmed novel series “The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games)”. However, the author of Hunger Games denies that he has heard of Battle Royale.
So Greene implemented this idea for such a Battle Royale mode for existing video games, for ARMA 2 and 3. He said that he liked the idea because it was not linear and playing in a world in which one would fail.
In December 2014, Brendan “Playerunknwon” Greene was already a big number that he made an AMA on Reddit:
A video game developer from Sony discovers him
That was his first success: In 2014, Greene earned enough money to fly back to Ireland, where he was back with his parents and lived from the state’s grants.
His parents did not find it so exhilarating that at the end of 30 her son said that he wanted to develop free gaming mods.
They asked him if he would make money with it – “not yet, maybe someday later,” was his answer.
But now an important person entered his life: John Smedley, a video game developer, worked for Sony Online Entertainment on H1Z1, a zombie survival game that did not really want to progress.
But Smedley with the right nose for trends now offered Greene whether he did not want to get in with him as a consultant. From then on, Greene’s life developed like a dream.
3 years to Brazil, a IRE gets his own game
So it went on: H1Z1 copied the idea from the mod from Arma 3 and was a surprising hit in the “H1Z1: King of the Kill” variant.
Although the game was rough and never really taped, the game concept has already fascinated many players. For his wedding on Steam, in July 2017, it reached 150,000 simultaneous players.
H1Z1 also shaped a new generation of Twitch streamers: Later stars such as DrdisRespect or Ninja had initial successes here.
In 2016, the South Korean company Bluehole Greene campaigned and offered him to develop his own game, which should even be named after Greene’s artist name: “Playerunkown’s Battlegrounds or PUBG for short.
PUBG became the dominant PC game in 2017. The Mania around PUBG reached its peak in January 2018 on Steam: the game had 3.2 million simultaneous players. And even if the hype led to PUBG in the west, Playerunknown’s Battleground still has 905,000 players on Steam, especially in Asia.
The avalanche “Battle Royale” will roll relentlessly from 2017
So his idea took over the genre: In 2017, the avalanche “Battle Royale” had become so big by PUBG that Greene no longer needed it so that she continued to roll up.
PUBG had been developed with the unreal engine for the PC, so the engine developer Epic Games has always had an eye on the game.
When their zombie survival game, Fortnite, who was planned as a summer hit, turned out to be a flop in late summer 2017, which quickly ran out of breath, Epic Games quickly set up the developers behind Unreal Tournament a new variant of Fortnite, which strongly reminded of PUBG.
With Fortnite Battle Royale, a mega plate was created, the Twitch, PC and the Consoles PS4 and Xbox One conquered. The game later came to mobile.
Fortnite’s bonds to PUBG were so great that Bluehole even filed a lawsuit but could not achieve anything.
After the Megaseller Fortnite, the large companies such as EA (Apex Legends) or Activision Blizzard (Call of Duty: Warzone) ultimately also entered the business and were able to book some successes. As big as Fortnite from the end of 2017 to mid -2019, however, no game became.
Fortnite’s success even culminated in a large World Cup as a live event in which many million US dollars were played.
Why did Fortnite replace the original PUBG? Fortnite had 4 great advantages:
From social welfare recipient to the star developer
This is how Greene saw SPhis success: In 2019, CNBC Greene interviewed at the time and asked him how he now felt that he was now such a star for a few years after lived in Ireland. He said:
I’ve already traveled around the world two or three times, just to meet fans and to conventions [und] Events to go. I love it.
There are many rumors about him that he was on the yacht and sip champagne, but most of the time he works from 9 a.m. to the afternoon 5 p.m. and have a normal life. But the nice thing is that he can now take care of his family and daughter and no longer have to worry about many things:
I am amazed at how big a game mode is that I developed many years ago and from which an entire genre of games developed.
Whether Brendan Greene has a brilliant idea that will shape the gaming of the future for 12 years after he has changed the gaming is still open at the moment. But he will try it: Creator from PUBG makes a new game, it is certain that many will hate it – but it helps a huge MMO