THE KILLING FIELDS
How a new shooter genre emerged from dystopian satire to rule
The premise is simple: be the last player standing. But the road to victory is fraught. Out there, running across the map somewhere, are dozens of others, each with the same aim and also scavenging for the gear that might give them a sliver of an advantage when the crucial moment arrives.
Battle royale games, as they’re known, are about those live-or-die moments when careful preparation turns to heart-stopping panic. When a door suddenly opens and you’re face to face with an enemy, or when cold calculation turns to scrappy sprays of bullets as a steady bead on an unwitting target is upset by another player chancing upon the encounter.
High in concept, high in drama, over the past couple of years the battle royale has exploded. It’s begun challenging the traditional COD and Counter-Strike hegemony of online shooters, fuelling thousands of hours of streaming and YouTube videos and entertaining millions of viewers. The biggest, from Playerunknown’s Battle Royale and H1Z1: King Of The Kill, through to the newest and most popular,
Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, are all designed by one man: Brendan Greene, otherwise known as Playerunknown, or PLAYERUNKNOWN, if you follow the unerring way his name is presented in his games’ titles.
“There’s no linear storyline; you just do whatever you want,” Greene tells us. “In battle royale you land and all you have to do is win. That’s the only mission you have, and how you choose to do that is completely up to you.”
From roots in the modding community around DayZ, when he was living in Brazil, to licensing his idea to Sony Online Entertainment when he was living in his native Ireland and then to moving to South Korea to make Battlegrounds for online-game publisher Bluehole, the battle royale has certainly taken Greene places. But the idea itself has a long history of its own – one that reflects the organic, almost folk-art way that so many of the biggest game genres, from DOTA to team shooters, evolve and grow, often in parallel.
Battle royale’s history begins in a movie. You might guess which one. Based on a book by Koushun Takami, the 2000 Japanese cult hit Battle Royale follows a class of school kids who are dumped on an island and have three days to kill each other until only one is left. It’s brutal and wry, a satire on Japanese school culture and adults’ unjust expectations of children, and about the everyday struggles of adolescence.
It also begins in a series of books which kicked off in 2008. Again, you might have heard of it. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games presents a similar setup: 12 children from poverty-stricken districts of a nation under draconian rule are selected to compete in a televised event in which they must kill each other. The sole survivor wins a reward for their district, and it’s all watched over as entertainment by the elite classes. It’s about rebellion against oppression; of a hero rising and then having to take on the crushing responsibility of leadership.
Both Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are keen parables, using games as a canvas to explore themes of freedom, societal fairness and violence. But they’re driven by the same stark and thrilling concept: a violent almost-sport, set in an enclosed space, under controlled circumstances. It’s little wonder that it so quickly found expression in videogames.
The first one in which it meaningfully landed was, weirdly, Minecraft. Back in 2011, just as it finally left beta, a series of custom maps started appearing in
Minecraft communities. The maps were just Minecraft worlds; they weren’t coded, and there was nothing that ran and refereed the games. Instead, the players would agree to obey the rules, not destroying blocks or building where they weren’t meant to, playing deathmatches and team survival games.
There were also Hunger Games maps. In terms of layout they were straightforward enough, featuring a central area with gear-filled chests, and surrounding lands studded with more, if you could find them. At the start, all the players would stand around the centre, their inventories empty, just as they do in The Hunger Games itself. When the game started, they’d scatter, aiming to find gear and items to prepare them for victory.
“Since most of these early Minecraft game modes started out as loose rulesets between friends on custom maps, it’s impossible to tell who made the very first one,” says Simon Laflamme, founder of Hypixel, which is one of Minecraft’s largest