The Battle Royale Genre

Austin Nuchols, Staff

Everybody has heard about Fortnite. It’s the new craze that is taking over video games. But what is Fortnite? Fortnite is the current most popular Battle Royale game. Battle Royale games are based off of the 2000 Japanese movie called Battle Royale. The movies features 42 Highschool freshmen sent to an island all alone. Battle Royale games mimic this. Generally, players spawn and land all over the map, then a “safe zone” pops up and players must move into this zone to survive. The safe zone gets smaller as the game goes on, and gets smaller and smaller until a single victor stands.
Battle Royale in gaming all started with Arma and Minecraft. Minecraft was more focused on the Battle Royale shown in the Hunger Games, but Arma was purely based on the Japanese movie. Brenden Greene, or PlayerUnkown online, created a mod for the game that featured a 100 player drop from a plane, with a safe zone, with gear spawning on the ground. Greene also added in his own idea to the genre, a red zone that is plagued with some sort of danger that the player must deal with. Arma Battle Royale and Minecraft Battle Royale popularized the genre.
After the release of Arma 3 Battle Royale Greene moved on to work with Daylight Studios to create H1Z1, a battle Royale focused on fast place gameplay over the slower Arma. H1Z1 brought even more players to the genre. Over the next few years a few more Battle Royale games popped up including a Battle Royale version of Ark: Survival Evolved. The Battle Royale featured the standard Battle Royale stuff, as well as Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures that you can tame and ride. Other notable games that included Battle Royale modes include GTA: Online and Paladins.
Move onto 2017 Brenden Greene finally completed work in his own official game, Player Unkown’s Battlegrounds. The game featured the same slow combat that Arma featured, but it was built on it’s own engine and wasn’t based on the features of another company’s game. PUBG blew up over the next few months, getting thousands of views on various streaming websites. Another game came and stole the spotlight however. Fortnite was released around the same time as PUBG but it’s rise to fame was much slower. Fortnite was originally only released on PC, but once the game released on console it blew up. The game is free to play, and the fast paced action makes the game wildly popular. The game has reached a popularity that was previously unheard of in games, with rappers like Drake playing with people that stream the game on Twitch. Fortnite is only the current popular iteration of the genre. The future will tell what game takes it’s spot as number one.