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Comment by postexitus | Hacker News Reader

There is a much stronger connection between Battle Royale and Hunger Games, than Squid Game. Very similar government depiction, the announcement of deaths etc. Moreover, we should appreciate Battle Royale even more - because it was done waaay before any prior art existed.

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You know what they call Battle Royale in France?

Hunger Games with Cheese.

I saw Battle Royale as a subbed bootleg around 20 years ago. Fantastic B-movie, and I understand some of the young actors got some notable roles as they got older (Takeshi Kitano was there because he was Takeshi Kitano), but it’s still a B-movie. Good time though, even today.

As an aside on Takeshi, for those who want to go down a rabbit hole, dig into “Takeshi’s Challenge” on the Nintendo Famicom. That game is a trip.

> battle royale was a B movie

Yeah, if it's not an American movie, it's some cheap shit! /s

My brother, it was nominated for nine Japanese Academy Awards, it was helmed by one of Japan's top directors, is an adaptation of a best-selling novel, is regarded by critics as one of the best films of the era, has high production values, stars arguably the most famous actor in Japan, was scored by a famous and prolific composer (you might have heard his music in another movie called Django Unchained), etc.

That's not even getting into the economics of film in Japan. A successful film in Japan nowadays earns around $10M on a budget of half a million. BR, produced nearly twenty years ago, had a budget nearly ten times that much and grossed triple.

Suffice it to say, Battle Royale is a high production cost movie, which forecloses the possibility of it being a B movie.

and because I'm just some guy,

https://variety.com/2018/film/asia/japan-ethics-of-making-ch...

I’ll stick my neck out and assert that “cheap” films are better, anyway: movie budgets’ sizes are inversely proportional to the producers’ risk tolerance; therefore, big money films are devoid of originality and any message they carry is nought but masturbatory self-aggrandisement.

The best films I’ve ever watched, that which had the biggest effect on me, were TV-plays and self-funded documentary-films.

>> big money films are devoid of originality

That may be true for some but at the really high end, writers have the resources to so some fun things. Even many high-end marvel-style movies have hidden jokes and themes that 99% of viewer don't ever pick up on.

Example - Dune 2. Good looking junk.

I got that wrong.

“You know what they call the Hunger Games in France? Battle Royale with Cheese.”

Too many things going on, typed it in backwards!

Why not just edit your original comment?

I was past edit window.

You can edit up to 2 hours after you write your comment.

that changes if people have voted on it or replied to it.

This is a better joke too.

disagree. putting it on its head makes it funnier imo

But then if they have cheese, why would they be hungry?

First version was funnier.

Are people not getting the Pulp fiction reference?

It is 30 years after pulp fiction came out.

Last year I was chatting with the 20 year old son of a friend, and he didn't know what Highlander was. I mean...

> Last year I was chatting with the 20 year old son of a friend, and he didn't know what Highlander was.

Well there was only the one movie.

for those confused, its a reference to a john travolta line in "pulp fiction" -

https://genius.com/John-travolta-and-samuel-l-jackson-royale...

First introduced to Takeshi Kitano in the 2000 remake of "Zatoichi" (highly recommend).

If you like Beat Takeshi I can't recommend his "Outrage" trilogy enough.

The outrage trilogy is amazing, I would also recommend Sonatine and Hana-bi.

In 2003 I was first unknowingly introduced to Takeshi Kitano on MXC on Spike. That fall in a Japanese film class I saw him in Sonatine which remains one of my favorite movies. Then in the spring of 2004 Zatoichi was released and I saw it in theaters. I had a year in my life where Takeshi Kitano was *everywhere*.

Btw he's back ! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42663063

Zatoichi is so so. Watch Sonatine.

I wonder if anyone will pick up Red Rising at some point. Might be too expensive to do properly

hope so

An animated show might work! Will Wight's Cradle series raised over $1M on Kickstarter for an adaptation

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/author-will-wight/anima...

Also, Asakusa Kid (biopic of him) is a really good movie, and Hana-bi is a great movie as well.

Battle Royale was a novel before it was a movie, and it's a much better novel than movie.

lord of the flies is the name of the novel?

Probably not, since aside from "kids in an island" there's no relation between the two, anymore than there is between and Gulligan's Island and the Castaway, or Alien and Passangers ("people on a spaceship").

Takeshi Kitano , AKA Vic Romano of Takeshi's Castle ("MxC" in US cable networks).

For anyone that misses that jewel of japanese game show, they have rebooted the franchise and the new series are available in Amazon prime.

>but it’s still a B-movie

It was "the third highest-grossing Japanese film of 2001". "At the 2001 Japanese Academy Awards, Battle Royale was nominated for nine awards, including Picture of the Year, and won three of them".

Hardly a b-movie, except in the sense "not a Hollywood blockbuster crapfest"

Fujiwara did not have to wait to become a famous actor after BR. The same for Shibasaki Ko (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ko_Shibasaki)

People focus on Kitano too much he was just a secondary character in that movie.

IIRC, Stephen King's "The Running Man" and "The Long Walk" predate both Battle Royale and Hunger Games and deal with similar themes.

The Long Walk is cited by the Battle Royale author as an inspiration.

He also has his protagonists hail from the fictional town of Shiroiwa-cho 白岩町, which is a direct translation of King's frequently-seen "Castle Rock". I wonder how many Japanese readers of the original spotted that.

"The Running man" by Stephen King was published in 1982, the movie starring Schwarzenegger was released in 1987 (another adaptation will be released this year in 2025)

The story is similar to a Robert Sheckley's short story from 1952,"The Prize of Peril" adapted into a movie in Germany in 1970 "Das Millionenspiel" and in France in 1982 "Le prix du danger" (same year as King's Running Man novel)

I would say "The Prize of Peril" is the grandfather of these books, movies and series, as far as I know. Battle Royale is the start of another branch, though : it's not one vs many anymore, it's many vs many.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prize_of_Peril

> it's many vs many. More like everyone against everyone.

So Hobbes' "war of all against all" is the real prior art, then?

Would The Most Dangerous Game maybe be an earlier ancestor? Although the game in that is more one sided.

Best episode of beavis and butthead

Definitely at least some cousin branch of the family tree...

The Most Dangerous Game walked so Hard Target could run

Perhaps the core source of inspiration are the roman gladiator arenas, themselves probably inspired from olympic games.

Collins has cited "The King Must Die", Mary Renault's book about Theseus and the Minotaur, as a primary inspiration for the The Hunger Games, FWIW.

The Most Dangerous Game was published in 1924

I vividly remember watching Battle Royale with my college roommate, and when it was over, we looked at each other and said "this would be an incredible premise for a video game". This would have been like 2004. We even tried to mod it into the original FarCry engine (the island setting was perfect), but it was too difficult for us. Too bad we didn't actually have the chops to do it, could have gotten the jump on Fortnite/PUBG by over a decade lol. Really wish we had stayed motivated, looking back on it.

edit: But yes, Battle Royale is a great movie, and Hunger Games totally rode its coattails.

I had the same idea after watching Hunger Games. Played around with the concept for a few weeks and then eventually tossed it. My first interaction with Fortnite was when I saw them selling t-shirts in a brick and mortar shop.

But I don't feel hard done by, I'm sure many people had similar ideas around that time, and I never executed. I also have no idea how I would get a large multiplayer game off the ground without funding. The idea of making even a two-player game scares me.

Before Fortnite released its Battle Royale game, it was a PVE survival/crafting shooter. It did the Battle Royale game mode copying the absolute sensation that was PUBG in 2017

But PUBG began as a series of mods for Arma 3, before moving to its own game with its own monetization (and running like absolute crap on release too).

I think there have been versions of PUBG mods for Arma for much longer than when I discovered it.

Stephen King's "The Long Walk" was published in 1979

"Every year, on the first day of May, one hundred teenage boys meet for an event known through- out the country as "The Long Walk." Among this year's chosen crop is sixteen-year-old Ray Gar- raty. He knows the rules: that wamings are issued if you fall under speed, stumble, sit down. That after three wamings... you get your ticket. And what happens then serves as a chilling reminder that there can be only one winner in the Walk— the one that survives"

Lord of the Flies?

Definitely relevant and maybe inspirational, though I find "fight to death game show" format quite distinctive, so much so that it created its game genre 15 years later even with the same name as the movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game

interesting, had no idea!

Yeah, that was the oldest reference to humans hunting humans I could muster.

Smash TV arcade game is from 1990. Not that distinctive in gaming.

Big money! Big prizes! … IIIII LOVE IT!

The term predated the movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royal_(professional_wre...

Manhunt?

Squid game reminded me a lot more of Liar game (the many variants) than a battle royale, though no one dies in the latter.

I especially like the “minority rule” game.

Amen!

There's also mechanical similarities to Fortnite and PUBG. Especially the variety of weapons and an ever-shrinking map.

Unsurprisingly, since PUBG was essentially "what if Battle Royale was a video game?", and Fortnite is a PUBG clone.

Well, the free side of Fortnite is a PUBG clone. The old, paid zombie/horde side is coop

PUBG and Fortnite are both directly inspired by Battle Royale. The whole video game genre exists and is named such because of that movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game

PUBG was inspired by the movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds

Fortnite added Battle Royale game mode because they saw how popular PUBG was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite_Battle_Royale

Brendan Greene made the ARMA Battle Royale mod before he PUBG. ARMA BR, H1Z1, then PUBG.

https://www.reddit.com/r/h1z1/comments/2q7xie/hey_folks_this...

> The whole video game genre exists and is named such because of that movie.

If so, then it is ultimately named for the pro wrestling free-for-all format. The author says in the foreword that's how he chose the name for the book.

The term "Battle Royale" has existed since at least the 18th c.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/445444/origin-of...

So they renamed the game from PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (thus why everybody called it PUBG) to PUBG: Battlegrounds. So what does the BG in PUBG stand for? The game is a real example of a PIN number!

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