’PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’: The Unflinching, Unfinished Enigma That’s Entrancing Gamers

I've been hiding in the bathroom for the past five minutes now, an eternity in game time. I might look like I'm camping, crouched in the corner with my shotgun pointed at the door, but this isn't about taking advantage of unsuspecting prey—it's about survival. My eyes wander, tracing the cracks in the tiled walls, examining the mouldering toilet. No one has lived here for a long time.

I wait, and wait some more. I wait until I get the alert that I'm no longer in a safe zone. I need to move. I open the bathroom door, creep out of the abandoned house—slowly, slowly—and crouch-run through an open field. I hear gunfire, but before I can even pinpoint where it's coming from, I'm dead. It's random, brutal.

This is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, a PC game that takes survival of the fittest as a religious mantra. First released onto the Steam marketplace as an unfinished Early Access title in late March, it initially bears a strong resemblance to most other unfinished titles on the platform. It's missing features and limited in scope—its own description says it's "being developed with community feedback." It's rife with glitches and errors that range from minor to game-breaking; it's the sort of game that you sometimes have to struggle with to play.

Yet, in the two months since its release, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has become dizzyingly, overwhelmingly popular, occupying the Global Top Sellers spot on Steam for weeks. How did an in-progress title become a legitimate gaming phenomenon?

"PlayerUnknown" is the handle of Brendan Greene, a game developer who rose to prominence thanks to popular military simulator game ARMA 3. The ARMA series is easily moddable and has become in recent years a sort of incubator for creative multiplayer ideas (a few years back, the hugely popular zombie survival simulator DayZ began its life as a mod for ARMA 2). Greene created an ARMA 3 mod called Battle Royale; Battlegrounds is the stand-alone version of that game mod, still in development.

It takes place on an isolated island loosely modeled after some derelict Eastern European war zone; abandoned houses and brutalist apartment complexes nestled into verdant hills next to silos, Soviet-styled military installations, and a quarry with the look of an open grave. In the middle of this location, one of a few planned for the full game, Battlegrounds drops 100 unarmed players. You begin each match in a cargo ship soaring over the topography, and before the plane reaches the other end of the island you have to jump out.