If you haven't played a PC game since Command & Conquer: Red Alert or Curse Of Monkey Island, it may shock you to know that it's come on in leaps and bounds.
PC gaming, as you may know, is serious business and esports is now on its way to becoming a recognised Olympic sport and prize money for tournaments are reaching into the tens of millions.
One game, in particular, that has been recently embraced by esports and gaming streamers is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, or PUBG as it's more commonly known. The game works sort of like Hunger Games, or Battle Royale. Essentially, you and 98 players are parachuted onto a map that's 8 x 8 kilometres wide with no guns, no armour, no medkits, no supplies, no nothing. It's then a case of scavenging for all of these, hiding out in houses and the like to see who survives.
That might not sound all that interesting, but consider that most games nowadays come with player levelling, and micro-transactions for guns and armour that give players a higher advantage over others starting out. In other words, it's a game that actually requires skill to survive and win - and not just cheap ways of paying to win.
The game has been hailed by reviewers as redefining the genre in the same way that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare did in 2007. What's more, the game made $11,000,000 in its first three days of early access playing and so far has made well over $100 million, and had an all-time peak of 1,523,179 concurrent players on Steam. As of writing this sentence, 918,515 people are playing it on Steam - and the game is due to be ported to both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
And it's all thanks to an Irishman called Brendan Greene, from Ballyshannon in Co. Donegal. The lead game designer currently lives in South Korea, where the gaming studio behind PUBG, Bluehole, are based. According to an interview with Rolling Stone, Greene developed the game from a simple mod for Arma while on the dole, living in his parent's house in Ireland, into the success it is today. While the game might not have any outward nods or winks to Ireland, Greene mentioned that he does plan to work some Father Ted references into the game in the near future.
Considering the game itself is set on an island, seems logical he should make a map based on Craggy Island.
Here's a little snifter of the game in action.