Brendan Greene’s plan to take us into the woods and disembody the tech platforms | The BIG Show

Brendan Greene, the creator of PUBG, is making a game that will drop us in the woods and have us find our way out. And if it goes as planned, it will exist on the web without the need for gaming platforms.

That’s a big idea, and it’s why I interviewed him for The BIG Show at the recent GamesBeat Crossfire event at the GDC Festival of Gaming. We talked about his new company, PlayerUnknown Productions, and his plan to make three major games, including Prologue: Go Wayback, which is now in early access. Each game is a step along a decade-long path.

A decade ago, Greene spent his 40th birthday hanging out with South Korean game developers he had met two days before. They were part of a company that would later become Krafton, and they took Greene’s mod for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and turned it into a game that sold more than 100 million copies since its release in 2017.

With the massive success of PUBG, Krafton was able to go public at a $22 billion valuation in 2021. While Krafton went on to fully exploit PUBG with PUBG Mobile and reached more than a billion downloads, Greene stepped off the treadmill.

“I was going back to my roots,” Greene said in our conversation for The BIG Show.

He founded PlayerUnknown Productions so that he could work on his next big idea. The first game is a survival game where if you are caught in the rain too long, you could die.

Prologue: Go Wayback has started its open beta. Source: PlayerUnknown Productions Prologue: Go Wayback is a game where you land in a procedurally generated map of the woods, with each instance covering 64 square kilometers. Your job is to survive in the woods and reach an exit point in the map, a weather station.

For a lot of fans of PUBG, I’m guessing this doesn’t sound fun. But Greene thinks about it in different ways; he enjoys going out into the virtual woods to relax and chill. It’s also a technical wonder, where it locally generates terrain on the user’s own machine, and that terrain can be different every time the player logs in to start a new game. It’s a combination of procedural generation and machine learning.

It’s a testbed of sorts, the first of a few massive games that Greene, also known as PlayerUnknown. The proceeds from his prior success have enabled Greene to patiently build a game studio in the Netherlands that has huge ambitions to make the next big thing.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/e0vSBYwN7Og?feature=oembed Prologue: Go Wayback is a single‑player open‑world survival game that uses machine learning to generate millions of possible landscapes. Built in Unreal Engine, it’s just the first playable experiment for Greene’s larger ambitions. For those looking for a game as dramatic combat game like PUBG, where only one of many players survives, this game is slow-paced and very different. It’s for modders or user-generated content fans, with guided world-building. It’s where your biggest enemy is the weather.

The game started out a bit empty, naturally, and fans criticized it for that. But Greene’s team has a plan to populate the world with things to do that can create emergent experiences, or unexpected play. Greene believes in letting players figure out the world themselves so they can understand what survival truly means and get some joy out of solving their own problems.

PlayerUnknown Productions is generating procedural game worlds. Source: PlayerUnknown Productions The second project underway is Preface: Undiscovered World, or Game Two. It will test more of the technologies that Greene’s team has been developing in his quest to create a large-scale world. It will be a multiplayer game that stress tests a networked, shared experience.

And that large-scale, “Earth-sized” world will be Project Artemis, a massively multiplayer sandbox world that is like a new kind of 3D social platform for players — a persistent shared world with a user economy and more. Greene calls this Game Three.

All of these games are very ambitious and normally they would require gigantic server farms when running at full scale. But Greene’s team is building these worlds with tools that can generate the worlds on a user’s own machine. It’s a kind of procedural content generation that combines with AI machine learning smarts.

“If you want to create an Earth-scale world for millions of players, you traditionally do that with servers,” Greene said. “You’re just not going to be able to scale. And if you do it generatively via the world models they have on servers these days, it just doesn’t scale to Earth-scale. So it has to be local, like the tool you use to create the world. It has to be like a calculator … it gives you the same result every time. But it also doesn’t require you to ping a server every time or spend tokens to get a result. It has to be all local. So we’re doing it kind of the opposite of what a lot of people are doing.”

That platform will be accessible via a simple web link. You can access the game and it will generate worlds on your own computer. Over time, that platform will grow into something that can operate independently of game platforms. On that path lies developer freedom and a direct link between a developer and gamers.

Greene released an early version of Prologue: Go Wayback! in August, 2025. It was buggy, and some players were disappointed with the lack of gameplay for a game that lacked directed play. But Greene’s team worked on it and fixed the bugs. By November, they released a paid $20 early access version and the ratings have been going up, he said.

Greene himself finds that when he needs a bit of peace, it’s a wonderful thing to just go walk in the virtual woods. We caught up at a quiet spot near the recent Dice Summit in Las Vegas and again at GDC.

Here’s a YouTube version of our video conversation and an audio recording on Spotify. Enjoy!

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