A battle royale game, also spelled battle royal, is a video game genre that blends the survival, exploration and scavenging elements of a survival game with last man standing gameplay. Battle royale games challenge a large number of players, starting with minimal equipment, to search for weapons and armor and eliminate other opponents all while avoiding being trapped outside of a shrinking " safe area ", with the winner being the last competitor in the game. The name for the genre is taken from the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, which presents a similar theme of a last- man - standing competition in a shrinking play zone.
The genre's origins arose from mods for large-scale, online, survival games like Minecraft and ARMA 2, before becoming their own standalone games. While PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which released in 2017, was not the firstbattle royale game, its rapid popularity, with over 25 million copies sold by the end of 2017, popularized the genre. In 2018, the free-to-playFortniteBattle Royale rapidly became a cultural phenomenon, overtaking Battlegrounds in terms of player numbers and revenue.
