A group of teenagers must play a deadly game which can have only one winner. All of the losers will die. If you think you’ve seen this one before, you probably have; the premise of The Long Walk, the film adaptation of a Stephen King novel, can’t help but bring comparisons to The Hunger Games or Battle Royale, two genre-defining titles that came out well before the new movie. And yet, the book version of The Long Walk, released in 1979 under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman and written in the ’60s, came out well before either of those dystopian death contests. But even that wasn’t the first instance of the most dangerous game, to allude to another totemic work, in fiction.
Setting aside the history of gladiators and the tradition of swords-and-sandals cinema about that bloodsport (a whole genre of its own), pop culture is full of games where the contestants must compete or die. These dystopian hunts, duels, battles royale, children’s games, and long walks with the highest stakes imaginable have long enthralled audiences. It’s nice to think that our enjoyment of these contests with body counts comes from more than just a voyeuristic sadism, and indeed the best of them have a lot to say.
Here are 11 of the most thematically rich death contests in all of pop culture. There are more deadly games than we could possibly list, but these are the most influential and most interesting. Plus, it wouldn’t be a celebration of death games without some losers.
The Most Dangerous Game
The crazy Russian aristocrat in Richard Connell’s 1924 short story might have been hunting the most dangerous game when he set his sights on human beings, but compared to some of the deadly contests that it inspired, the gameplay itself isn’t that elaborate. General Zaroff simply gives his prey meager supplies and a head start before the hunt begins and they must evade him on his private island for three days—though Zaroff meets his match when another big-game-hunter-turned-hunted outsmarts him. Despite its simplicity, it’s a foundational text, one that is essentially the origin of most modern fiction about deadly contests. The basic premise has been adapted or remixed many times, including in John Woo’s Hard Target, the 2020 movie The Hunt, and Ready Or Not, which put a fun hide-and-seek spin on the hunting. More complex death games would add more rules or spectacle that makes them into richer texts, but there is something undeniably fundamental about how The Most Dangerous Game flips the script, making people into disposable amusements for a bored hunter with a gun.
Punishment Park
With however much respect is due to the ancient Romans and their gladiatorial games, a common theme in a lot of fiction about deadly contests is that only a broken, dystopian society would engage in such state-sanctioned bloodsport. Punishment Park, a 1971 mockumentary-style film from English director Peter Watkins, is one of the first modern works to explore this idea. Set in a reality where President Richard Nixon has taken an aggressive stance against anti-war protesters and other civil activist groups, the film follows a British and West German film crew as they document a group of imprisoned leftists who have opted to try to survive three days in Punishment Park, a desolate stretch of desert where they’ll have to evade the National Guard hunting them down. (The terrible, if in retrospect inevitable, truth? Even if they manage to survive and get to the end, there’s no freedom; they’re sent to jail anyway.) Compared to some of the dystopian contests that would come after it, Punishment Park‘s “game” is almost a rough draft—its true power comes from how immediate its dystopia is.
The Long Walk
The most striking thing about The Long Walk is the mundanity of its contest. So many other last-man-standing games are about conflict, reminiscent of fighters in the arena. The broken dystopian societies that enable these sadistic contests are at the very least doing well enough to put on an elaborate show. This is not the case with The Long Walk. The hobbled America in King’s novel, and in the movie, is clearly struggling. There’s no spectacle or conflict, just a brisk stroll with no finish line on a highway with crumbling asphalt. Walk, or get shot in the head—a fittingly pedestrian way to die, all things considered. There’s nothing complicated about The Long Walk, which makes it all the grimmer. Nobody has any fight in them to levy against one another, let alone against the totalitarian regime putting them through their paces.
The Running Man
Richard Bachman’s other deadly, dystopian work with a bipedal mode of locomotion in the title’s big innovation was adding a rapt audience. In the 1982 book and the 2025 film starring Glen Powell, Ben Richards agrees to participate in a televised game show where he’ll have to escape trained hitmen who are on his trail trying to kill him. The longer he survives, the more money his family will get, and if by some miracle he makes it 30 days, he’ll get a $1 billion bonus and the network calls the hunt off. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation will be eagerly watching—and participating themselves. The Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the ’80s has a different plot, basically being just “American Gladiators but deadly,” though the reality TV aspect remains. The Running Man hit shelves well before reality TV truly took over the airwaves, making it a prescient work of fiction. (The Prize Of Peril, Robert Sheckley’s 1958 short story, was even earlier and had similar foresight.) Take away the murder aspect, and it’s not too hard to imagine a version of The Running Man airing after Survivor on CBS each week. It’s also not as hard as one might hope to imagine a world, and an audience, who become bloodthirsty enough to stage a faithful recreation.
The Quick And The Dead
Any number of Mortal Kombat-esque tournaments with bracketed fights to the death could qualify for this list, but Sam Raimi’s criminally undersung Western is number one with a bullet, pun intended. Starring Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman along with a young Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe right before he blew up, The Quick And The Dead follows Stone’s gunslinger as she enters a quick-draw tournament run by outlaw mayor John Herod (Hackman), seeking revenge. Though the first round wasn’t necessarily lethal, rounds two and on are gunfights to the death, which makes The Quick And The Dead an interesting look at the honor and various genre-based motivations that drive the contestants. They’ve all got a reason why they’re here, and they all have a reason why they’re going along with the rigid, unforgiving rules of the contest rather than working outside the boundaries of the deadly duels. It’s also probably the most fun thing on this entire list, due in large part to Raimi’s goofy love of Dutch angles.
Battle Royale
Battle Royale, a 1999 novel that was adapted into a film the next year, didn’t invent its concept, though it certainly codified it for the modern era. Though author Suzanne Collins has denied it, we likely wouldn’t have The Hunger Games without Battle Royale‘s influence, to say nothing of Fortnite or any number of games whose genre gets its name from the Japanese cult classic. Set in a totalitarian Japan whose government wants to send a message against juvenile delinquency, Battle Royale collects a random high school classroom and has them fight to the death until only one student remains. Attempt to escape or fail to comply, and explosive collars around their necks detonate. Whereas a lot of other deadly contests have some level of opt-in participation, even considering extenuating circumstances, Battle Royale‘s teenagers are arbitrarily forced into this. They’re innocent, though part of the thoughtful horror of Battle Royale comes from how quickly some of the students take to their new kill-or-be-killed environment.
The Hunger Games
Though comparisons between the YA series and Battle Royale are inevitable, The Hunger Games is a surprisingly complex work that’s much more interested in the workings of dystopia and traumatic effects of killing. The series is at its tightest and most visceral when Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) is in the arena trying to survive against the other tributes, but it’s in everything around the actual Hunger Games where the story shows its true ambitions. The spectacle of the games is just a distraction from the messy work of rebellion.
Sword Art Online
Death is cheap in video games. A player almost always has another life they can use to try to beat a level. Sword Art Online, a light novel series adapted into an anime in 2012, takes away this back-up and makes the digital stakes very real. One of the most popular examples of the transportative isekai subgenre, the first arc of SAO takes place inside an immersive new MMORPG, but the thousands of players who log on day one are horrified to find that they’re trapped in the game’s fantasy world with no way to log out—and if they die in the game, they die in real life. Where SAO differs from a lot of the other deadly games on this list is that the players aren’t fighting one another (with a few exceptions). Instead, they’re working together to try to beat the game, a challenge that gets more dangerous and daunting even as the survivors level up. The action is exciting, though SAO‘s most interested in the downtime. When the deadly alternate reality of the game becomes their only reality, the relationships and social skills the players are developing are very real. It’s an exploration of young life inside a game of death.
Avengers Arena
That Marvel Comics’ Avengers Arena was piggybacking off the popularity of others on this list is not a secret; covers for the 18-issue series included an overt homage to The Hunger Games, as well as references to Battle Royale and The Lord Of The Flies. Arcade, a third-tier supervillain, got a dangerous makeover when he kidnapped several teenage Marvel heroes—including fan favorites, from series like Runaways and Avengers Academy, along with some new faces, and forced them to fight to the death. Avengers Arena was controversial partly because fans didn’t want their beloved characters to die (as many did) and partly because it felt exploitative to have these heroes murder one another. But that’s exactly what makes Arena such a unique battle royale: Few other death games feature previously well-known and liked heroes forced to go against their morals. Many battle royale-style contests raise questions about whether morality, let alone heroism, is even possible in such an evil contest; Avengers Arena heightens this quandary by making its fighters literal superheroes.
Escape Room
That creepy puppet on a tricycle might famously ask Jigsaw’s victims if they would “like to play a game,” but the traps in the Saw franchise, while brutal and thematically motivated, don’t really feel sporting. Enter Escape Room, a two-film franchise that takes a popular real-life trend and makes it deadly—all while still feeling like a game. A modern B-movie in the most complimentary way, Escape Room has a group of strangers come together to participate in a series of puzzles, though they realize pretty quickly that the penalty for failing to solve the elaborate head-scratchers is death. The first movie feints at some larger Final Destination ideas about the players all being chosen because they had previously been sole survivors of various accidents, but really Escape Room is about clever setups for elaborate kills in a modern contest’s context. The meaning behind Escape Room‘s deadly games isn’t what’s complex, but rather the mechanics themselves—which is enough to stand out amidst a host of kill-or-be-killed competitions, especially considering the contests are a test of brains instead of brawn, an ambitious enough
Squid Game
You could make a credible case that Squid Game, the Korean series that became an international smash for Netflix, is the culmination of the entire loosely defined genre. Following a group of desperate participants who play lethal versions of children’s games in the hopes that they’ll be the final survivor and win the life-changing prize money (all while rich patrons watch the games for their own twisted amusement), Squid Game makes explicit in its text what a lot of past deadly contests have featured as part of their inciting action or thematic atmosphere. A broken society that hosts death games for sport, featuring contestants who have no other choice than to try to win, doesn’t need to be a fanciful dystopia. That’s just capitalism, baby.
