Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More
Elvis Presley once said, “Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.” Brendan Greene, the creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), has a lot of ambition. His battle royale game, inspired by the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000), has sold more than 80 million copies.
And one of Greene’s ambitions is doing something important like that again in video games. And so he just announced that his PlayerUnknown Productions is resurfacing after years of development with a three-game plan to bring on the next generation of survival games. And it’s ambitious.
I talked to Greene, who is known as PlayerUnknown, about it in an exclusive interview. It’s down at the bottom of this introduction and I hope you like it. At the end, I asked him about ambition.
Greene got the idea from the movie that he could stage a battle where 100 people would compete with each other. With each player eliminated, the battle space would get smaller until the last two were battling it out in a very small circle. The last one standing was the winner.
Greene first created a “mod” called DayZ in the Arma universe. Then he teamed up with South Korea’s Krafton to make PUBG. The game debuted in 2017, disrupted shooter games like Call of Duty. On the strength of PUBG’s 80 million in sales, Krafton went public and Greene became wealthy from that. That gave him the money to work on something even more ambitious.
Brendan Greene is the creator of PUBG and he is on to his next survival project.
I had a front row seat to this plan. Greene went off on his own to create a new startup, PlayerUnknown Productions, in 2021 to make a gaming survival world that was a lot like a metaverse. Then he gave me a scoop on his ambitions.
Without anything to show me except a screenshot at the time, Greene said was creating a world called Prologue that had a huge amount of terrain — about 100 square kilometers. That world, bigger than just about any existing game world, would be a test where players would drop into the world …