Battlegrounds' beloved butt-protecting frying pan was an accidental addition

Game developers know better than anyone that some of the most memorable or rewarding parts of a project can come about by complete accident. Turns out, that was exactly the case for the arguably most iconic weapon in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: the bulletproof frying pan.

In a chat with Eurogamer, PUBG creator Brendan Greene shed some light on the origins of the impervious pan. He says that the object itself was meant as a reference to the Japanese movie Battle Royale, but only realized after putting the item in the game that the film featured a pot lid and not a cast iron pan.

Later on, he and lead programmer Marek Krasowski decided to see if they could give the pan the ability to swat grenades out of the air. Greene told Eurogamer they knew it was a feature few players would ever see, but that someone would no doubt get to see the grenade deflect in action and love it. 

After successfully giving the pan collision properties, Greene and Krasowski called it a day, only to wake up the next morning and find out that the grenade swatting pan had somehow snuck into the game’s latest patch. But as an even bigger surprise, the pan itself was bulletproof even while holstered and would protect a player’s keister from gunfire while strapped to their belt. 

“We didn’t realize it would protect against bullets, you know, that kind of stuff," Greene tells Eurogamer in the video above. "I’ve seen people bat the frying pan and a bullet hits it that was going for their head, and they bat this bullet out of the air. The feeling’s amazing. Stuff like that is truly emergent; something that you can never really plan for.”