Battle royal (gaming)

Battle royal (sometimes spelled as battle royale) is a video game genre that blends the exploration and scavenging elements of a survival game with last man standing gameplay. The name for the genre is adapted from the early entries in the field which were inspired by the Japanese media franchise Battle Royale, as well as being a computerized form of a traditional battle royal.

The genre had early roots in survival games such as DayZ, in which players struggled alongside or against each other to obtain basic necessities to continue living in a persistent sandbox filled with various dangers. This led to the development of other mods that sacrificed the game's open-endedness in favor of focusing on hostile interactions between players to determine an eventual winner. One such game was the Battle Royale mod for ARMA 2 and 3 developed by Brendan Greene, better known as PlayerUnknown. Greene continued to adopt his format as a consultant for H1Z1: King of the Kill before becoming the creative developer at Bluehole, Inc. of a standalone game representing his vision of the battle royal genre, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

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