Cirque du Soleil meets PUBG at the Global Invitational opening ceremony

When I tuned in for the opening ceremony of the PUBG Global Invitational taking place in Berlin today, I was expecting to see a reel of highlights and a few words from creative director Brendan Greene. I got those, but that wasn't all. A multimedia presentation featuring an enormous projection screen, an orchestra, and something out of Cirque du Soleil happened next. Have a look at the Twitch clip above.

After some violinists (or violists, I'm not sure) took the stage, a plane flew over on the enormous screen and then stunt actors descended as if skydiving from the ceiling. It took... kind of a while for them to switch to a parachuting position, and then a bit more time for them to safely reach the stage and carefully unhook themselves.

It didn't end there! When the performers 'landed', they began miming a round of PUBG for the, quite frankly, half-empty stadium (to be fair, it's only day one of the tourney).

Dramatic music played. There were pyrotechnics and even muzzle flashes when the performers pretended to fire guns (sometimes). There were no flying cars or stream-honkers, at least. I admit I laughed a bit because it was a little silly and overdramatic, and also because the cameras weren't great at capturing the action (as is often the case in actual battle royale tournaments).

I'm hoping the closing ceremony is equally bombastic. The PUBG Global Invitational, with $2 million in the prize pool, can be viewed here on Twitch. It runs from today until July 29, and here's the schedule of matches.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.