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Comment by PinkMilkshake | Hacker News Reader

This isn't the first time they've tried this. They attempted a copyright lawsuit against Epic for Fortnite when it came out.

I don't recall all the details but I remember them implying that they owned the battle royal concept.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17509114/pubg-fortnite-la...

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Yeah but Fortnite wasn't copying the design of entire maps.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mdKpGBRrAcA/sddefault.jpg

Those maps are a copy? You could have foold me.

How is that a copy? I don't see it.

They are both islands, duh! Nobody came up with this concept before!!7! other than all the things PUBG copied when its creator pivoted from copying Zombie games (in DayZ).

the island map is a direct homage to the -korean- japanese novel/movie "Battle Royal"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/57/Battle_royale...

note that the original had no smaller island connected by two bridges, a detail which Garenas version inherited from PlayerUnknowns.

Not Korean, but Japanese.

Battle Royale had such an influence on PUBG up to the point that the devs made a special skin for the homage:

https://www.destructoid.com/pubg-is-getting-some-sweet-battl...

Also note that there were some other rarely mentioned games that contributed to the conception of the battle royale genre. The Hunger Games Minecraft mod was the first I’ve seen the concept actually materialized in a video game.

urgh you are right, no idea why my brain jumped to korea :-/

Also note that last man standing with shrinking play zone was the multiplayer experience of the Bomberman game series, going back as far as 1983, but the japanese battle royal novel may have been inspired more by other "winner takes all" or "last survivor" patterns in popular culture and games that are far older. (wrestling and boxing, to be precise which included more "multiplayer" in the past than today). I wonder where the novel took the "forbidden zones" idea from, that became PUBGs "bombardment zones"

First BR game I recall playing was actually a shareware single player Amiga text game named LabyrinthII by Russell Wallace. It was on Fred Fish Disk 162.

So a classic text adventure style interface and map, but you and the bots all started at random locations and have to go around searching for weapons & armour and trying to survive against each other to be the last one standing. Didn't have the concept of a shrinking playzone but was absolutely a Battle Royale.

Really enjoyed that one back in the day, and would often play while listening to the 'Unknown Girl' mod that was on the same disk. The Amiga had proper pre-emptive multitasking after all :-)

The pro-IP crowd has officially become self-parody if you guys are passing that around as a "copy."

strange, since the pubg map is itself a copy of chernarus from dayz, which apes off of real places.

Which apes off Arma, which apes off of the idea of real places*

"Big island with small island connected via choke point" !== clone. It's also like that because it makes for interesting gameplay when you have the shrinking border that's common in BR games - you get in to situations where you know you or other players have to cross the bridge to leave the island.

Wouldn't this fall under software patents? Not sure about the US but it's not a thing in Europe.

I don't think copyright applies unless code was actually copied. But IANAL.

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