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PUBG hailed game of the year
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SCORES of virtual warriors faced off in a Hunger Games-style death match in a massive, real-world eSports matchup of upstart shooter game “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.”
The computer game’s rise has been epic, with some industry trackers branding this, the year of “PUBG,” even though it is still technically in trial mode with a final version yet to be released.
In a colossal two-day event that ended last Sunday, 80 players hunched over computers set up in an arena, where the champion Golden State Warriors usually play home basketball games. Shooter games played as spectator sports typically pit one team against another, and such was the scene nearby in the Oracle Arena in Oakland where a “Counter-Strike Global Offensive” tournament was taking place as part of the overall Intel Extreme Masters event.
Brendan Greene of Ireland, the creator of “PUBG,” released an early-access version of the game online at Steam in March, referring to it as a “very special day” in a blog post. That was more than 20 million copies ago, according to data service Steamspy.
A Steam chart showed PUBG was the most played PC game on Monday, with nearly 2.7 million people simultaneously taking part at a peak point.
“With PUBG’s growing popularity, we really wanted to incorporate it into this event,” Electronic Sports League vice president of pro gaming Michal Blicharz said. “The interest in the game from the industry and growing PUBG community is greater than I can remember.”
Hints of Hunger Games
It’s a dizzying rocket to success for a game born of frustration with eSports titles seeming to play it safe and predictable with tight maps, established lanes for action, and reliance on hectic action and hair-trigger reflexes.
Greene had a different vision for competitive game-play, and began to make it real by modifying source code of military-style games Arma 2 and 3 to create a modification or “mod” called “Battle Royale.”
Often likened to the blockbuster book and film series “The Hunger Games,” game play created by Greene takes place on large virtual islands where players drop in, scavenge for resources and weapons, then battle rivals and the environment to be the sole survivor.
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