PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds — or PUBG for short — is one of the most popular video games of 2017, despite not technically being finished yet. A beta version launched in March has sold more than 10 million copies at last count.
It’s being developed right here in Madison.
The game’s designer, Brendan Greene, known more commonly by his gaming handle, PlayerUnknown, tweeted several screenshots of the game in July that were rendered in Madison. Greene, creative director for Bluehole, the South Korea-based company producing the game, wrote “I’m at our new @PUBATTLEGROUNDS office in Madison today. The team is working on our desert map.”
The company has declined an interview until the game’s official, full release expected later this year. Its office is on Blount Street, in Madison’s Marquette neighborhood. It’s unclear just when the brick-and-mortar space opened up shop, or if it is yet fully staffed. In May, Bluehole posted a job ad online looking for a graphic artist to create “outstanding environments and terrains” in Madison, and told the video-game news site Polygon in June that terrain artist Shawn Wiederhoeft would be heading the office. Wiederhoeft illustrated a military base in the current version of Battlegrounds and has worked on several other notable games, including Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Greene told Polygon that the Madison office is an integral part of Bluehole’s five-year plan to expand the company, bringing the total number of developers up to 90.
“We wanted to get more artists … and working in South Korea can be a challenge for some of them,” he said. “So we’re setting up an office in Madison, Wisconsin, so we can employ artists from Montreal and places like that and get them to move down.”
Battlegrounds is loosely based on the Japanese film Battle Royale in which an authoritarian government forces teenagers to engage in a fight to the death. Players (up to 100 per game) parachute onto a deserted island: five square miles of abandoned buildings, vehicles, and weapons. They grab whatever weapons they can lay their hands on — from assault rifles to frying pans — before taking shelter or going on the attack. As they battle, the borders of the game shrink, forcing the survivors closer and closer together. The last player standing wins.
Bluehole recently released clips of animated players launching themselves onto the hoods of cars, vaulting through windows, and clambering over fences and walls, which will purportedly be new features of the full-fledged game. The company also says there will be new weapons, new game modes (such as a “zombie” reimagining of the game), and players will be able to replay action sequences and view them from many angles.
There will also be two new maps which are being produced in Madison.
Madison has been flirting with becoming a national hub for gaming over the last 15 or so years, as Aaron Conklin reported in Isthmus in 2015. Scott Resnick, vice president of Hardin, a software development and web design company that’s been in Madison since 2007, says that over the past five years, Madison’s tech community has “made great strides” in the game-development industry.
Raven Software, Filament Games, and PerBlue are three game-development companies already based in Madison, Resnick says, “and now, adding one more to the mix, we have a good number of gaming studios housed right inside the city. What that means is we are able to cluster both talent and resources around the gaming industry, and I only see that industry growing in our community.”
PerBlue’s chief operating officer, Forrest Woolworth, says he feels validated that a foreign company saw “the potential in Madison as a strong game-development hub.” Woolworth, who is a founding member of the Wisconsin Games Alliance, says he has contacted Bluehole about joining the statewide trade association and getting involved in the local community.
Josh Pomerenke, a web developer at Hardin, says he has bonded with a number of colleagues by playing Battlegrounds together and live-streaming video footage of their games over Twitch.
“I really enjoy the game.... I started playing long before I knew [the Bluehole office] was coming to Madison,” he says. “Now I can say we support local business while playing.”