On the ground at PlayerUnknown’s 2-day in-studio modjam where devs broke their own game
It is about one hour to presentation time and Alexander Helliwell has decided to experiment. His mod—an attempt to convert Prologue: Go Wayback’s default temperate woodland biome to a scorching desert—was looking pretty slick last time I passed by: all dazzling sunsets and dry heat and, an added bonus, running quite well. Turns out that yanking most of the game’s world out and replacing it with sand carries a performance uplift.
It’s still performing quite well, but a glance at his screen reveals a new, seemingly major change. Now the sands are pockmarked by great stretches of an unidentifiable black substance, the aftermath of experimentation on the mod team’s part. “Is that oil?” someone asks. Helliwell turns in his seat, eyes wide: “I don’t know.”
Let’s jam
In the last few days of 2025, PlayerUnknown Productions summoned its developers for one of its regular in-person conflabs. Though its offices are in Amsterdam, very few of its staff actually live anywhere near the city, and to compensate for the deficit in physical communication, company policy is to have as many staff as possible make the schlep to Mokum every couple of months.
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Devs roll in from across Europe on trains and planes from Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and beyond. At least one bleary-eyed staffer has spent 12 hours on a train from Marseilles. But they are not—this time—just here to endure a barrage of stand-ups. They’re here for a modjam, the same kind of minor modding festival that fans of games like Minecraft throw all the time, with the aim of spinning up game mods in a limited period.
It’s an experiment: what happens if you loose a dev team on their own game and let them do whatever they want to it, using a rough assemblage of UE5 asset-store props, the game’s pre-existing systems and objects, and whatever they can gin up themselves over the course of two days’ modding?
Quite a bit, it turns out. Over 48 hours, Prologue’s devs spin up new mechanics, items, systems, and full-blown total conversion mods. Some of them even conjure up ad-hoc marketing departments, producing ads and mock-up Steam pages featuring their creations. At the end of the jam, they’ll present their work to the rest of the studio: what they learnt, where they think the ideas could go from here. An idea that goes down particularly well might find itself incorporated, one way or another, into a future update to the game itself.
But it’s also an experiment in modding as a concept. “Modding was one of the bigger requests that we’ve had from the community,” says studio founder Brendan Greene, the PlayerUnknown in PlayerUnknown Productions. “They want to be able to fuck around and do their own thing.
“This is what the modjam is for. It’s like: let’s do some experiments and see how possible this is and what we can do.”
What we can do
PlayerUnknown Production’s developers split into 10 projects, consisting of anything from a single dev to a full team of five. I rove between them in a way that must be quite annoying, accompanied by studio head of publishing Maurice Tan, whose task is to enlighten me as to precisely what I am looking at on people’s monitors, while simultaneously ensuring that I don’t commandeer an empty desk and unearth forbidden game design secrets or start developing PUBG 2.
My main posting is with senior 3D character artist Hakan Kamar, who’s working with four other PlayerUnknown Productions devs to create a project that converted Prologue into a full-on horror game. If you were out of earshot of copyright lawyers, you might call it a Slenderman mode: “Something follows you, you don’t know what, and you need to progress through the forest finding items, and then eventually escape.
“The thing we want to test is: ‘Can we make Prologue a horror game?'”
The answer, so far as I can tell, is ‘yes, though not without some difficulty.’ In place of Prologue’s usual loop—spawn in, try to survive and make your way to a distant weather station in a generally barren world—Kamar and co’s horror mod has you collect scattered pages while avoiding the creature-legally-distinct-from-Slenderman. In place of the weather station, looming over the map is a great grey monolith, lit up by floodlights in the dark. It’s the Half-Life-2-esque laboratory from which your pursuer escaped.
“The thing we want to test is: ‘Can we make Prologue a horror game?'”
It is also far, far too large. Kamar is futzing with it as I watch, murmuring that “100 times is too big” as the sheer scale of the building sends the game’s camera careening through the level geometry and down into the heart of the Earth.
Elsewhere, other devs on the horror team beaver away on their own bits of its creation, heads down in full production mode. In evening meetings the full squad—consisting of art director Jorry Rosman, senior character concept artist Sarah Sneeboer, principal audio designer Miguel Salas, programmer Yoan Rock, and Kamar—ponders choices like whether the creature should teleport around the island or be forced to walk everywhere, which skin materials to use so it doesn’t practically glow in the dark, and whether its heavy-limbed “Sopranos walk” is a positive or negative (positive, obviously).
Meanwhile, Salas works on the audio for the mod’s creature-detection system, a Silent-Hill-style radio that gets increasingly distorted the nearer the monster is—the strains of Tiny Tim’s Livin’ In The Sunlight slowing to static as your doom approaches.
It’s a remarkably serious operation for what might, at first, seem like an end-of-year jolly. Rosman even gets cracking on a full-on marketing campaign for the mod, replete with Steam pages and product screenshots. The team treats the jam like, well, game development, with all the gravity that implies, save for their first choice of name: “What Happens In The Darkest Days In The Dark?”
Right to the source
The studio bustles during the day I spend in its office. Teams work on their projects, yes, but they also flit back and forth between desks, taking in developments in each other’s work, offering criticism, advice, and expressions of sheer bafflement, and occasionally coming away with new inspiration for their own projects.
It’s almost too perfect: a physical microcosm of the kind of organic, freewheeling internet of yore that has been almost entirely obliterated by corporate consolidation. No wonder Greene is keen on the Modjam idea—this is his entire pitch for Prologue and the games that will follow it. “The internet is dying,” he says. “What was once one of humanity’s greatest hopes of technology, meant to bring us closer, has decayed into a minefield of bots, of misinformation and digital splintered digital bubbles… But we don’t come online for bots. We come online for each other.
“Even here today, we have all the team in for that human connection, rather than doing stuff online all the time. You need that. Now, I think that human connection is needed more than ever.”
Greene’s vision for Prologue isn’t short on ambition—he sees it as step one of a metaverse, an open-source “global commons” that, unlike similar pitches by Mark Zuckerberg, “cannot belong to a single company.” He imagines—not Prologue itself, but the tech and ideas behind it—one day providing the infrastructure for an internet more like the one we had 20 or 30 years ago, just in 3D: a space for the spontaneous formation of human relationships (and, you know, sometimes people calling you a prick over a Star Wars argument). “People don’t want ‘content.’ They want each other.”
Am I fully bought in? Not quite, but then if you’d shown me PUBG in 2016 I wouldn’t have bet that’d become the defining template for seemingly all videogames for years to come either. Regardless of what I think, Greene’s grand plans for Prologue and its successor games means that events like the Modjam are kind of essential. People have to be able to build on this foundation for it to become anything like the sunlit, open-source metaverse that Greene and the team imagines down the line.
Black hole sun
The good news for that vision is: it all seems to be going quite well. As Kamar and the horror mod team gin up Steam page assets and cover the collectible pages with royalty-free baboon drawings, other devs labour on their own mods. In one corner of the office, Helliwell and environment artist Boy Best convert the game from a frigid European forest to an Arizonan desert—”You’re no longer trying to stay warm, you’re now trying to stay cold and cool and stay hydrated.”
Despite only two days’ work, a casual onlooker (me) would be hard-pressed to notice the game was not always desert-based. There are even new sandstorm mechanics to obscure your sight and scramble your sense of direction. Helliwell has, perhaps inevitably, labelled some of these mechanics “Darude – Sandstorm” in the recesses of the game code. Occasionally his speakers quietly emit the song itself, in what must surely be a boon for team morale.
Meanwhile, a team consisting of technical game designer Guillaume Lucas, senior FX artist Dominikus Reiter, programmer Adrien Fabre, and environment artist Thijs de Haas is working on making Prologue a little bit more Far Cry, adding vehicles like a hang-glider and, tantalisingly, a shopping cart to the game.
The latter might actually be the more technically demanding of the two—attempting to cajole Prologue’s engine into allowing the player to fill a cart with loose objects and move them about can prove too much for it. During the project’s presentation to the studio, the team runs into an inevitable crash when the trolley gets overfull, prompting whoops and cheers from their assembled fellow devs.
But my favourite of the lot is the black hole, created by technical artists Michael van den Berg and Djanco Dewus. It’s, well, a black hole. A great void manifests in the sky and pursues the player about the map, sucking up potentially useful items, starting fires, and growing ever-larger as it does so.
The aim is to force the player to keep moving—a little dash of PUBG’s circle in Prologue—but I mostly find it entertaining as an exercise in random destruction. You can’t help but feel Prologue’s devs are working out a little of their frustration with the game’s sometimes-untameable engine when they create mods whose aim is to lay waste to the entire thing.
The past is prologue
Is this the future? You won’t catch me making definitive pronouncements for people to mock from the comfort of their orbital habitats 50 years from now, but I’ll say this: if the modjam proves anything, it’s that you’ll never truly kill devs’ desire to tinker with tech for the sheer love of it, no matter how corporatised and monopolised our online spaces become.
Whether it’s the future or not, it’s not a bad foundation to work from.
