What DayZ mod did Brendan Greene release in 2013 before PUBG?

Brendan Greene released the DayZ: Battle Royale mod in 2013 before creating PUBG: Battlegrounds.

Greene, who used the online name PlayerUnknown, built the mod for DayZ, itself a survival modification for Arma 2. He was interested in combining DayZ’s scavenging, open-world tension, and player-versus-player encounters with a last-person-standing structure. The result established many ideas later associated with battle royale games.

DayZ: Battle Royale drew inspiration from the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale. Greene emphasized large maps, randomized item placement, and a shrinking play area that pushed surviving players toward one another. These features made each match less predictable than a conventional multiplayer shooter.

The DayZ project was not PUBG itself. Greene later adapted the concept into an Arma 3 version commonly known as PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale, then advised on H1Z1’s battle royale mode. Bluehole eventually hired him to lead development of the standalone game released as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in 2017. DayZ: Origins, DayZ: Epoch, and DayZ: Overwatch were different projects and are not the canonical answer.