The game's concept and design was led by Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle Player Unknown, who had previously created the AREA mod Days: Battle Royale, an offshoot of popular mod Days, and inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale.
At the time he created Days : Battle Royale, around 2013, Irish-born Greene had been living in Brazil for a few years as a photographer, graphic designer, and web designer, and played video games such as Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and America's Army.
The Days mod caught his interest, both as a realistic military simulation and its open-ended gameplay, and started playing around with a custom server, learning programming as he went along.
Greene found most multiplayer first-person shooters too repetitive, considering maps small and easy to memorize.
He wanted to create something with more random aspects so that players would not know what to expect, creating a high degree of replayability; this was done by creating vastly larger maps that could not be easily memorized, and using random item placement across it.
Greene was also inspired by an online competition for Days called Survivor Games, which featured a number of Twitch and YouTube streamers fighting until only a few were left; as he was not a streamer himself, Greene wanted to create a similar game mode that anyone could play.
His initial efforts on this mod were more inspired by The Hunger Games novels, where players would try to vie for stockpiles of weapons at a central location, but moved away from this partially to give players a better chance at survival by spreading weapons around, and also to avoid copyright issues with the novels.
In taking inspiration from the Battle Royale film, Greene had wanted to use square safe areas, but his inexperience in coding led him to use circular safe areas instead, which persisted to Battlegrounds.
When Days became its own standalone title, interest in his AREA 2 version of the Battle Royale mod trailed off, and Greene transitioned development of the mod to AREA 3.
Sony Online Entertainment (now the Daybreak Game Company) had become interested in Greene's work, and brought him on as a consultant to develop on JAVA and licensing the battle royale idea from him.
In February 2016, Sony Online split JAVA into two separate games, the survival mode JAVA: Just Survive, and the battle Royal-like JAVA: King of the Kill, around the same time that Greece's consultation period was over.
Separately, the Seoul-based studio Giant Games, led by Chang Kim and who developed massively multiplayer online games for personal computers, was acquired and renamed Blue hole Giant Games by Blue hole in January 2015, a major South Korean publisher of mobile games.
Kim recognized that producing a successful game in South Korea generally meant it would be published globally, and wanted to use his team to create a successful title for personal computers that followed the same model as other mobile games published by Blue hole.
He had already been excited about making a type of battle royale game after he had played Days, in part that the format had not caught on in Korea. He also wanted to make this through an early access model and have a very limited development schedule to get the game out as quickly as possible, while treating the product as a "games as a service" model to be able to support it for many years.
In researching what had been done, he came across Greene's mods and reached out to him. In July 2017, Blue hole partnered with social media platform Facebook to provide exclusive streaming content to Facebook's gaming channels, as part of their push to provide more gaming content for its users.
Around the same time that Greene left Sony Online, Kim contacted and offered him the opportunity to work on a new battle royale concept. Within a week, Greene flew out to Blue hole's headquarters in Korea to discuss the options, and a few weeks later, became the creative director of Blue hole.
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