[ SECRET POST #5398 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5398 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 38 secrets from Secret Submission Post #773.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[kamino_neko]

Squid Game, Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Alice in Borderland, Danganronpa, Zero Escape*, The Running Man, etc, etc, etc...

The 'death games' genre is really big, and not exactly new. They can be grouped into subgenres (Financial Desperation, Totalitarian Government Fuckery, In-universe Entertainment, etc), but generally each media brings its own take to the genre, including usually involving multiple of these subgenres.

I have mixed feelings on the sentiment expressed in the OP...as a fan of the genre, I'm glad I heard of Squid Game because of it (haven't watched it, yet, since I've currently got the attention span of a gnat for anything that's not interactive), but, it's also fucking maddening to have people treating it like it's some utterly flat plane where any two examples are basically the same thing.

* At least the first two games...I've not played Zero Time Dilemma, but I understand it changed up the formula, and doesn't use a Nonary Game.

[(Anonymous)]

^this

At this point, the genre is so big and diverse that you can't rightfully call it a rip-off. For me, the set up of Squid Game is closest to the magna/anime Kaij. Hunger Games isn't even kind of similar to Squid Game.

It is really fascinating to see how a genre grows, and I feel like the 'death games' genre is pretty recent. Battle Royale, which coined the term 'battle royale', didn't come around until 2000, and even that was pre-dated by Kaiji (1996).

I'm trying to think of what the oldest example is for death games. The Long Walk, 1979?

[kamino_neko]

Battle Royale, which coined the term 'battle royale', didn't come around until 2000

Couple nitpicks on this...Battle Royale was a novel before it was a movie, although it only came out in 1999.

And, while the movie seems to have refocused the definition a little (specifically onto death games), it didn't coin it - as mentioned in the intro of the novel, it's an old term (usually spelt 'battle royal') for last man standing mass matches in combat sports such as boxing or wrestling (Takumi specifically got it from pro wrestling). It apparently goes back to the 17th century.

As to the earliest death game story...hard to place. 1979 is definitely too late, though. 1975 brought us both Rollerball and Death Race 2000, both of which feature deadly sports (granted, before the events of the movie, Rollerball wasn't meant to be deadly, just brutally violent)...and both of which were based on earlier stories - from 1973 (The Roller Ball Murder) and 1956 (The Racer), respectively.