My friend and I were having a discussion the other week about the origins of the battle royale genre, and we were wondering "What was the FIRST battle royale game? Which game came along and kicked the whole thing off?"

We did some searching around the internet and in the end we couldn't come up with a definitive answer.

Sure, games like PUBG and Fortnite helped popularise the genre, but what actually came first? My friend mentioned the Minecraft Hunger Games servers, which I suppose could be a possible contender for the OG BR, and he also mentioned how games like DayZ or H1Z1 had a...somewhat similar premise, despite them being much more survival oriented, and I mentioned the fact that its origins could be traced back to Last Man Standing/Elimination game types, just on a larger scale, but those game types aren't quite the same as what we have now.

So what do you think, reddit?