Irish game modder Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene is moving to South Korea to work with Tera MMORPG developer Bluehole on a new standalone PC game, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, based on his popular "Battle Royale" mods for Bohemia Interactive's Arma games.
While game modding has long offered a potential path to a career in game development, it's notably rare to see a modder tapped to serve as creative director on a standalone game. That's exactly what Greene will be doing at Bluehole, which claims it already has a development team in place for the project.
“I’ve always wanted to create a standalone game based on the mod I created for the Arma series, and working with Bluehole gives me the resources and creative freedom to build the experience I’ve always envisioned,” Greene stated in a press release about the project. “We have a great development team in place, and our goal is to create a realistic open world experience with the deep gameplay and strong combat mechanics.”
Greene came to fame via his original Battle Royale mod for the Arma 2 DayZ mod -- which also went on to become a standalone game -- that introduced a "last man standing" competitive mode inspired by the Japanese novel/film Battle Royale.
The mod proved quite popular for both Arma 2 and Arma 3, driving Daybreak to later work with Greene to develop a similar mode for its multiplayer survival game H1Z1. That mode was later split into a separate game -- H1Z1: King of the Kill.