"So after a week or so with building and planning we made the first map and I released it on my YouTube channel." "I saw early and understood that a concept like that could work in Minecraft," Dennis Vareide told me over email. In March 2012, the first Hunger Games film was released, planting the idea of a 24-player battle to the death in one YouTuber's head. While MSG eventually evolved into a sprawling collection of game modes within the Minecraft community, the phenomenon stemmed from the work of one mapmaking team.
And to those involved in MSG, it certainly left an important legacy. Subsequent battle royales may not have continued directly from MSG, yet it's still a fascinating branch of the battle royale tree that too often gets overlooked. A decentralised development process, if you will. Although some game balance issues were never truly resolved, the community came up with dozens of quirky solutions to the problems, with creators borrowing ideas from each other or splintering off to create wacky variations on the original MSG rules. But perhaps most intriguing is the way the Minecraft community grappled with the challenges of designing a battle royale long before bigger studios tried their hand. At its height, MSG pulled in thousands of players on third-party servers, and millions of views on YouTube. Coinciding with an increase in Minecraft's popularity on YouTube, MSG has since been credited with helping start the Minecraft PvP server boom - and even launching entire companies.
And it came in the form of the Minecraft Survival Games.įirst emerging in early 2012, the Minecraft Survival Games (or "Hunger Games") was more of a community movement than a single title. Yet before all of these, there was a smaller - but not insignificant - battle royale boom elsewhere. Then, of course, came Fortnite: which recently celebrated reaching 350m registered players.
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Essentially a mod of a mod, DayZ: Battle Royale led to Daybreak's H1Z1 and Greene's standalone title PUBG, with the latter exploding in popularity and launching battle royales into the mainstream.
If you take the strictest possible approach to tracing current-day popular battle royales to their roots, however, you'll probably land at Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene's mod for DayZ in 2013. It's a tricky thing to pin down, as there's plenty of debate over what constitutes a battle royale, with many of the rules overlapping with other game modes. A true pedant could technically point to the use of "battel royal" to describe cockfights and fistfights in 17th century England - although even here, the jury seems to be out on whether the term originates from cockfighting or fistfighting. Some will say it was DayZ: Battle Royale, others will highlight earlier deathmatch games like Dyna Blaster. Ask a dozen different people when the first battle royale emerged, and chances are, you'll get a dozen different answers.