Before Fortnite and PUBG, there was Minecraft Survival Games

Ask a dozen different people when the first battle royale emerged, and chances are, you'll get a dozen different answers. Some will say it was DayZ: Battle Royale, others will highlight earlier deathmatch games like Dyna Blaster. A true pedant could technically point to the use of "battel royal" to describe cockfights and fistfights in 17th century England - although even here, the jury seems to be out on whether the term originates from cockfighting or fistfighting. Now that's a chicken and egg situation.

It's a tricky thing to pin down, as there's plenty of debate over what constitutes a battle royale, with many of the rules overlapping with other game modes. If you take the strictest possible approach to tracing current-day popular battle royales to their roots, however, you'll probably land at Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene's mod for DayZ in 2013. Essentially a mod of a mod, DayZ: Battle Royale led to Daybreak's H1Z1 and Greene's standalone title PUBG, with the latter exploding in popularity and launching battle royales into the mainstream. Then, of course, came Fortnite: which recently celebrated reaching 350m registered players.

Yet before all of these, there was a smaller - but not insignificant - battle royale boom elsewhere. And it came in the form of the Minecraft Survival Games.

Read more