Did you know Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, the creator of PUBG, wants to remake the internet? Stage one of his plan is already nearly complete

It’s safe to say that Irish video game maker Brendan Greene, known by the alias “PlayerUnknown”, is an ideas man. He’s credited with creating and popularising the battle royale genre, initially experimenting with it in an Arma 3 mod, then building it into zombie game H1Z1, before making the extraordinarily successful multiplayer shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – or PUBG as we know it now. Big ideas are irresistible to Brendan Greene, and few ideas come bigger than the one he currently has, to remake the internet.

You read that correctly. Greene told me in a video call he wants to remake HTTP, the foundational set of rules the internet is based on, but in 3D. He wants to fundamentally evolve the internet experience as we know it. Simply put, he wants to create the next internet.

There’s a lot to unpack here. The main thing to grasp is this is the end-point of a 10 year multi-game-and-technology project Greene has been working on since walking away from PUBG in 2019, when he moved to Amsterdam to create PlayerUnknown Productions and work on ‘special projects’ for South Korean company Krafton. PP eventually went independent, but with Krafton’s continued support.

The 10-year plan is to create three games to showcase and build technology that will eventually be able to generate entire planetary playing spaces in rich 3D detail, apparently, and support millions of people playing on them. “I want to do Earth-scale planets with millions of players – that’s the grand goal,” Greene tells me.

“I keep saying it’s like the internet in 3D,” he adds. “We have these shared social spaces on the internet. It’s a place. But in gaming or in digital places, we don’t really have a 3D internet – it’s still small bubbles of players doing things.

“But this is how I see these spaces, that they’re not necessarily game spaces but sandboxes or worlds you can share together. And I don’t think anyone’s really pursuing that, so that’s what we’re trying to do: building HTTP in 3D, essentially. Or HTTP for 3D, which is a long way out. So: enable millions of players in our scale worlds.”

Part-one of this grand plan is already fairly convincingly under way, in Prologue: Go Wayback, which is the first of the three games. It’s a survival and orienteering game in which you navigate across forested landscapes using maps and compasses, while trying not to freeze, overheat, starve, die of thirst, or break all your bones by falling. I like it – I’ve been playing it. Prologue: Go Wayback officially launches on 20th November in early access, but you can test it freely in open beta now.

But the reason for the game was the tech – to create terrain-generation tools such that the game can generate worlds quickly and lightly on your machine when you play. And Prologue: Go Wayback does this. Within minutes, it knocks up a unique and richly detailed 3D world for you to explore, with dynamic weather systems where the rain can turn the ground into muddy swamps. But Prologue: Go Wayback only does this at 8x8km scale, which is literally miles away from being anywhere near the size of the Earth (the surface area of which is nearly 200 million miles squared). Nevertheless, it’s a first step.

The next steps will be made by Game Two, a multiplayer shooter, and Game Three, which we know nothing about but will grow the size of the generated playing spaces exponentially again, while introducing yet more important game features beyond shooting and multiplayer, such as marketplaces and financial layers and so on. The other key component of is the studio’s proprietary engine Melba, which is currently preoccupied with the other end of world generation equation, the world-sized bit, though not with intricate terrain-level detail. The studio will use Melba to make its games from Game Two onwards.

“I said I want to build a Holodeck, right?” Greene says. “But it’s taking it in steps. We’re not trying to do everything at once, and we’re using the team we have in a smart way, because we don’t have infinite money. We have to worry about game sales and stuff like this, so it’s important to spend the resources wisely at this stage, because we don’t want to rush out the gate. These things need to be tested and proven before they can really be scaled up.”

The games, then, are an incredibly important way of not only providing focus for the studio but also of bringing money in, because – and this is perhaps the most surprising part about all of this – Greene doesn’t intend to sell or charge people for using the tech he’s building. All that work and he’ll make it free. But it has to be, he argues.

“Because we’re trying to build HTTP again, it has to be open source”

“Because we’re trying to build HTTP again, it has to be open source,” Greene tells me. “It has to be ultimately managed by a foundation. This is the only way that you get the internet again, because if it’s a company, then they have a mandate to earn money and monetise stuff, whereas providing a kind-of a universal platform for people to use, like the internet, requires a very different… We will still provide content for this platform, it’s why we’re making games as well, but ultimately it has to be open source.

“I want to be able to share with other teams to enable them to create big worlds,” he adds. “My vision for the company and the studio is to be this open. I don’t believe in keeping it shuttered. To create the next internet, it has to be done like five scientists in the room tried to do, which was just sharing that in a different way. And I’ve got five scientists in a room trying to create worlds in a different way, so hopefully history rhymes.”

Brendan Greene certainly is an ideas man, although this idea, as bold as it is, isn’t completely alien. There is no shortage of big tech companies espousing the future of a fabled meta metaverse at the moment, by which I think they mean a connected network of 3D virtual spaces, or worlds, which sounds a lot like what Greene’s making. Facebook famously pushed its metaverse so hard it changed its name to Meta, but since seems to have quietly abandoned it. Will Greene’s 65-person studio be able to succeed where Zuckerberg’s legion failed?

I think a more pertinent question is will Greene stick to the plan? He hasn’t even properly launched Prologue: Go Wayback yet, and when it arrives in early access, it’s still got years of development ahead of it. It’ll presumably be years after that Game Two materialises, if it ever does. Game Three? I’ll be amazed if it ever comes out.

But it’s an exciting prospect to consider. I like big swingers like Greene (I don’t think I’ll use that description again) because these ideas make my heart race. This isn’t iterative design, which is something we’ve become so accustomed to in games, but redesign. It’s giving birth to ideas that have the potential to disrupt everything – like PUBG once did. Whether or not Greene will ever get there, I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t think he knows. But that’s not going to stop him trying.