HICK-ARUS

From battle royale to burnout with former DayZ director BRIAN HICKS

- Jeremy Peel

BATON ROYALE

The projects that passed the torch to PUBG

MINE CRAFT HUNGER GAMES

Recreated the initial, bloody fight for equipment as well as the drawn-out deathmatch after.

DAYZ: BATTLE ROYALE

This mod launched the career of Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene.

H1Z1: KING OF THE KILL

Greene consulted on this branch of Daybreak’s zombie game. It’s available as Z1 Battle Royale.

There was no PUBG when Brian Hicks and Jordan Tayer conceived the Survivor GameZ, a last-player-standing tournament for DayZ. But in 2012, The Hunger Games was an international movie phenomenon, and Tayer couldn’t stop talking about its potential.

“He just kept pushing that point,” Hicks recalls. “The more he talked about it, the more I realised he’d push to make it happen, whether or not anyone had the ability to technically implement it. He put me in a position where if I didn’t jump in, learn how the hell Arma 2 worked, and figure it out, we were going to land flat on our face and everyone at work was going to see it.”

At the time, Hicks was a company man at Microsoft Studios, project managing by day and streaming