The birth of PUBG

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Everyone knows the game. There are thousands of players all around the world, and it is even the number one game on Steam. But who is PlayerUnknown, and why is it his battleground?

Brendan Greene was a fine arts major. He dreamed of becoming an artist, but that was not successful. His girlfriend of the time was studying graphic design, so he decided to try his hand at that. He soon found that working as a freelance designer and photographer worked pretty well for him. While continuing that line of work, he also had great passion for music, and he opened up a music studio with a friend. He just lived life as it took him, and even though it was unstable, it was the only way he knew how.

Soon enough he found love. He fell in love with a Brazilian woman and traveled with her back to her country, where they got married. Unfortunately the couple did not end as a happily ever after. After a couple years Brendan found himself broke, divorced, and alone. He was struggling to make ends meet. He had officially hit rock bottom. He saved whatever money he could after paying for rent and other bills, but there was hardly any. So he turned to gaming as an escape. He was an avid player of Call of Duty at one point, but that quickly got old. It was the same loop of just mindless running and shooting, dying and respawning. He thought, what if there was a game that made you think, that required more creative gameplay, that made you actually want to survive? And as he was very into the Japanese movie Battle Royal and the Hunger Games series, his ideas of a new type of shooting game slowly started taking form.

He didn't stop at just thinking. If there wasn't an ideal game in the world, he would create one. He learned how to create mods in the game Arma 2, and put out a mod which he called "PlayerUnknown's Battle Royal". PlayerUnknown was his online username and he had hoped it would become some sort of a brand, which in the future definitely does. It gained quite a bit of attention and support from other gamers. "I was monitoring the text chat and I'd see people saying, 'I've been waiting two days to get into this.'", says Brendan. It was a new and fresh concept. You only get one life, so the longer you survive the more you want to become the last man standing. You can't just jump into battle, you have to have strategy, because if you die it's over. But the gamers weren't the only ones who noticed Brendan's mod. Major game companies started noticing as well.

One of the big name companies that took note of his mod was Daybreak. Seeing that their game was inspired by his mod, Brendan tweeted the company half joking about how they should pay him so that they can create more together. That is how Brendan found himself on a plane to San Diego, to work with Daybreak as a proper game developer. There, H1Z1 was created, and rose to a big success.

Seeing the success of H1Z1, a South Korean firm reached out to Brendan saying that they want to further develop his idea of a battle royal video game. That company is Bluehole, the company we are familiar with for creating PUBG. Though skeptical at first, they eventually opened up to Brendan's unconventional ideas. And voila, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds came into the world. It was released to Steam Greenlight as an unfinished and very limited version, but the game blew up. In only a few weeks millions of people were playing the game.

PlayerUnknown is not unknown anymore, instead he is very well known within the community. He used to be just someone in the background, not knowing where life would take him and unsure of where to go himself. But putting in effort and sticking to something that he really had passion for let him do things that he never would have imagined. He stated, "we want to create a great space for everyone to enjoy across the globe", and create it he did.

References: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/playerunknowns-battelgrounds-brendan-greene-interview.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6VBTnr3XvU&t=618s

Setting: not specified

Problem: Brendan Greene was in a hopeless place, where he was broke and divorced and left all alone in a foreign country.

Solution: He found passion in creating his ideal video game, set his mind to it and made it in the end.

Moral: No matter who you are or where you come from, or however unfortunate your circumstances may be, you can do great things once you really start trying.