InterviewPUBG: Battlegrounds creator sets sights on massive digital worlds with Prologue

A scene from Prologue, a game by PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions / Courtesy of PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions

When Brendan Greene, better known as "PlayerUnknown," left the Korean gaming giant Krafton in 2019, he stepped away from the battle royale genre he helped pioneer. Today, his ambitions extend beyond the enormously popular game type he helped define with PUBG: Battlegrounds, aiming instead to create worlds that could reshape the future of gaming.

Greene's studio, PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions, nestled in Amsterdam with a team of more than 60, has spent the past few years quietly working on groundbreaking technology to create massive, realistic digital environments. Greene describes the journey since leaving Krafton as a humbling education in leadership and technology.

"I was very quiet because it was a struggle internally to try to get this simple survival game that we have now off the ground," he admits. "When you put a relatively inexperienced person in charge of a company, often things take a little bit longer."

Brendan Greene / Courtesy of PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions

The core challenge Greene set for his studio was ambitious: build immersive, procedurally generated worlds spanning hundreds of kilometers — far beyond typical game boundaries. Gamers could experience the result with a tech demo titled Preface: Undiscovered World. The second major step — Prologue: Go Wayback! — currently undergoing active testing, offers players a dynamic wilderness that reshapes itself uniquely every session. It is an exercise in what Greene calls "guided generation," an innovative machine-learning approach that constructs entire worlds around simple directives like a drawn river or outlined landscape.

"I wanted a survival game," Greene says, citing inspiration from his experiences playing DayZ, a pioneering open-world survival game. However, traditional methods of creating games weren’t enough to fulfill his ambitions. The turning point came when Greene and his team — comprising researchers with diverse backgrounds like mathematics and astrophysics — developed software capable of automatically generating detailed and varied landscapes.

"We spent about three to four months researching if we could understand terrain and natural data in a neural network," he recalls. Their pioneering tech now efficiently generates realistic, varied terrains locally on players' computers — a stark departure from manually designed environments often requiring massive artistic teams.

A scene from Prologue, a game by PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions / Courtesy of PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions

Greene's ambition doesn't stop at terrain. He describes his ultimate vision as nothing short of creating a digital "holodeck," referencing the immersive simulation technology popularized by "Star Trek." His endgame, Artemis, aims to culminate this technological evolution by offering worlds populated by millions of concurrent players, resembling the worlds envisioned in popular fiction like "Ready Player One."

The studio's vision extends beyond gaming entertainment. Greene envisions a digital equivalent to HTTP, offering an open-source, universally accessible platform where anyone can create and share virtual worlds. "We're building the internet, but in 3D," he explains. He insists that this system must remain open-source, managed transparently and guided ethically, mirroring the foundational principles of the Internet itself.

Despite his pivot from battle royale to broader digital creation, Greene maintains strong ties to Korea's passionate gaming community, which he developed during his tenure at Krafton. He praises the relentless dedication and cultural enthusiasm of Korean gamers and developers and notes the positive impact it had on his work as a game designer.

A scene from Prologue, a game by PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions / Courtesy of PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions

Prologue's upcoming public release on Steam will be a litmus test for Greene's lofty ambitions. Yet, he remains refreshingly candid about the uncertainty ahead, especially for those expecting a similar title to his previous smash hit: "I don't know if people will like this. It's a hard survival game. It's a lonely place. There's no one else on the map. It's just you."

But while Prologue offers a solitary survival experience, Greene hopes it also provides a peaceful digital refuge. "A lot of people live in small boxes with noise all day," Greene muses. "Having somewhere you can go and just sit by a lake or a river and read — not have to worry about other people trying to kill you — I think there's something there that people can use as a place to escape to for a while and wander around."

I had the chance to experience one of the game's playtests. Following Greene's suggestion, I put on an audiobook and settled by a virtual lakeshore, letting the sounds and sights of the generated nature wash over me. It's obviously no substitute for an actual trip into the wilderness, but for those without daily access to nature, Prologue offers a soothing alternative that can feel surprisingly restorative.

With many gamers watching closely, Greene's innovative technology and bold creative philosophy could define the next generation of interactive entertainment. Whether PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions becomes the architect of gaming's future depends now, fittingly, on the players themselves.

John Popko is a contributing writer on games.