Before Squid Game, there was Battle Royale

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.

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.

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"

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

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.

Lord of the Flies?

Amen!

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

> But I guess a show making that particular social critique isn’t going to get funded by a major studio or tech company.

I think my take on that is even more cynical: they'd be absolutely happy to make a story along those lines as long as they could monetize it successfully.

I thought the first season of Squid Game was wonderful and it depressed me to no end to see how thoroughly the whole thing was monetized. I get it, it's the way of the world, but seeing Netflix commission a "real life" game show, kids in Squid Game outfits at Halloween, the fact that the second season largely exists because the creator was financially screwed out of the first... I don't think it's possible to make a broader argument about any of this stuff without the distributors immediately undermining it.

"But I guess a show making that particular social critique isn’t going to get funded by a major studio or tech company."

You've never heard of Breaking Bad? More recently, Emily the Criminal is an absolutely superb movie and great example of exactly this - Aubrey Plaza's best role in fact.

""Saddled with student debt and unable to find work, a college graduate becomes involved in a credit card scam, acting as a dummy shopper and buying increasingly risky products with stolen credit cards.""

For the medical debt angle, the macabre and outrageous 'Repo Man'(2010) is a pitch-dark and fascinating examination of the end-game of medical insurance.

""Set in the near future when artificial organs can be bought on credit, it revolves around a man who struggles to make the payments on a heart he has purchased.""

Debt is a common trope in Korean shows and establishes the characters are destitute and answers why they would become contestants in this show. Then the show creator has the set up that allows them to start poking at class hierarchy.

In asking for a critique of debt in general, you are asking for a different show.

Squid Games is gets a lot of attention from the games and mass deaths of the contestants, but ultimately it is a Korean show using a different "language of film" than international audiences might be used to. Think of how silly a lot of hollywood tropes are if you stand back and look.

Try "My Mister" if you want a different take on a destitute character.

> credit cards with 25% interest rates

This is actually illegal in South Korea

> medical debt

South Korea has a single-payer system

> student loan debt

I think this is much less of a problem in S Korea than in the US.

> I suppose most of the contestants in the shows are in debt because of gambling or overtly irresponsible decisions, but it would be more interesting IMO if the contestants were in debt from student loans, credit cards with 25% interest rates, medical debt, and so on.

Student loan and medical debt don't have the kind of ticking clock that the issues in Squid Game (whether its payments on debt to gangsters, anticipated costs without which a loved on won’t get medical care, or whatever) have.

Do Korea or Japan even have student loans or medical debt?

I think you are confusing these US specific phenomenons with global ones.

I'm in your camp. Media like Squid Game annoy me to no end because they perpetuate the idea that any severe debt someone might be in is always the fault of the individual, rather than circumstance. And this, the system that continues to create student loans debt, housing debt, etc, goes relatively unacknowledged for another day.

As a result, I have trouble having any sympathy for characters portrayed in stuff like Squid Game. They brought it on themselves through their own greed, right? That is what we are supposed to think, I suppose. The show touches only mildly on why Player 456 needs to gamble on horses, showing that his mother is sick and that he is rather destitute after a failed marriage and being laid off, presumably unable to find different work. We're supposed to empathize with that position, but it certainly does not reflect my own debt struggle, nor that of anyone who is suffering the same fate I am which is driven by a lending system that turns us into indentured servants. I don't gamble or take any real financial risks. I just made the mistake of being born with a lifelong medical condition, trying to buy a house and a decent car, and put my kid through college, and I suddenly find myself in a very deep hole with zero chance of escaping before I die. Of course, on screen, that's not as sexy as debt from crime and gambling.

Not all the characters in season 1 had debt problems; the main girl for example wanted to bring her family from the north. Also have you seen Parasite by any chance?

I think you’re wrong, anything can be used for making money. I don’t think any major studio would refrain from funding anything if they felt it would profit.

For such things to be plausibly popular, the contestants cannot elicit sympathy in the (fictional) audience: “It’s their fault they are in debt, but not my fault I am in debt.”

For the same reason (wanting someone to look down on) the one group that reliably votes against minimum wage bumps is the group whose pay is below the new minimum wage, but above the old minimum wage.

My country tried student debt. The experiment was ended after a few years. As many things American politics it should stay on that side of the Atlantic.

Turns out saddling young people up with 50k debt for a mediocre degree is rather demoralising.

I think a pretty salient line from an organizer of the games in ep 2 of the new season is "the games won't end unless the world changes."

The show doesn't really interrogate that beyond that point, but if anything honestly points to a future where something like it is real - except it will be televised and everyone will watch and it won't be secret.

> But I guess a show making that particular social critique isn’t going to get funded by a major studio or tech company.

I don't really get this point (which I often see repeated online). There are tons of TV shows, books, movies, songs, etc, which include scathing critiques of various aspects of "the system" (government, the financial sector, the medical sector, the class system generally, etc). Many of these are produced and promoted by "big business". There is no centralised control over what gets funded, businesses will fund and produce what is likely to make them money. If shitting on capitalism will make them money they'll happily sell you that.

I love this take, and it is something that can be seen in real life as well. It is particularly apparent on a show like "Alone" where people try to survive in the wilderness for $500k. Most of the contestants are professional survivalists who need the money to get their own land to build and farm on.

I love watching it for the survival strategies and the human endurance aspects, but it does feel a bit dirty when they start talking about how badly they need the money as they try not to starve for a few more days.

Why is that odd? People like to watch shows about a topic but don't necessarily want to take action in the real world about issues depicted therein.

This is kind of why I can't watch Squid Game. I just can't convince myself to watch it since it's probably going to be depressing.

The shows are made for the average person and the average person doesn't understand the insidious effects of interest

Student loans isnt much different than gambling though, except it’s socially accepted and higher education isn’t seen as the scam it really is

> I suppose most of the contestants in the shows are in debt because of gambling or overtly irresponsible decisions

It's depressing that we're still stuck framing gambling as "irresponsible decisions" as online gambling becomes more and more ubiquitous and deliberately drives addiction.

That doesn’t work though.

The people in the games are there because they are gambler types on some level. A person with student loan or credit card debts wouldn’t be a very interesting player, a person with medical debt might not even care about paying back their medical debt enough to risk their life.

These people want to make a fortune to pay off their debt and live lavishly.

Squid Game actually only makes sense in the context of Korea which doesn't have robust bankruptcy laws like the US. Student loans are the exception, everything you could just walk away from in the US.

Criticism of usury is a sensitive subject because it has in past unfortunately been associated with extreme racism.

Why wouldn't it be? Tech companies, perhaps until very recently, have been extremely left-leaning.

And if you disagree that they were all very left wing: college being an overpriced scam is a conservative take! So either side will happily highlight that, although perhaps only one will suggest why that is.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadlyGame

This dates back to at least Ancient Rome, where slaves would fight each other in the Colosseum for the amusement of spectators. Many people volunteered (actually seeking enslavement) because being a gladiator led to glory and riches.

Flamma was granted his freedom 4 times and refused it every time! He refused to quit and ended up dying in his 30s. The idea that someone would voluntarily rejoin the game show of death is very realistic.

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

That being said, many gladiators didn't really have the skills to pursue a different career after retirement.

The best thing about Kaiji is that it falls into one of the most common genres of manga: edutainment. Every challenge is solvable via game theory or social psychology, explained in surprising depth.

One of my favorite things about manga is that regardless of what genre a series might seem to fall into, it might also involve in depth explanations of topics either real or fictional. That combination of soap opera and explainer is so common in Manga and seemingly so rare outside of it.

Not only that but Squid Game is literally the “real live adaptation” of Kaiji; the creator has said that it (the initial concept, the premise, etc) is based on Kaiji (he said it’s inspired by a manga with the same theme).

The card game with the slave (I love that one) and the “waza” in the background when the main character doubts himself are some iconic missing adaptations. :)

Here is an online adaptation of it: https://e-card-kaiji.netlify.app/

> And before Battle Royale, there was Kaiji.

Coincidentally, they both are from 1996. Though, the Battle Royale-novel was only finished in 1996, while Kaijis first chapter was released in 1996. So maybe they had the same inspiration, or somehow the novel was influenced by the Manga, even though it was so early in its fame.

And before that there was The Running Man and The Long Walk both by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) that were about deadly game shows / contests in futuristic dystopias.

The power of Kaiji is how the author via the main character thoughts go into the metagame of each game.

The art style is "special" but the content of the anime and the manga (because you'll want more of it) are top notch.

And before that was Hard Target, which is arguably a better story than both.

Battle Royale's premise is not identical, but what you're describing does match Squid Game. Is that what you meant to write?

Kaiji is a fantastic manga!

The atmosphere is quite unique and for 1996 it was so innovative.

Yeah I don't understand why people make the connection between Squid Games and Battle Royale.

Hunger Games is the one closer to Battle Royale, while Squid Games is just Kaiji with better presentation.

Lord of the flies is related too.

There's always a TV tropes page with a much more complete list

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadlyGame

FWIW, dealing with misbehaving kids was a pretty serious issue in Japan at the time. A ton of pressure were put on them, and they diffused that pressure upon other kids, with pretty dire consequences (including deaths)

Of course the core issue isn't the kids, but that's not what the system was trying to solve. It evolve in a less bloody way (by instituting a system where teachers can basically dictate grades independent of test results), but Battle Royale is definitely a product of its time, and some teachers would probably have been totaly fine with that solution.

Sort of explains in the book that Battle Royale was a bureaucratic fuckup. Battle Royale takes place in an alternate reality where Japan didn't lose WW2 and the fascist government continued into the 21st century. Some time around the late 1940s, some politician facetiously suggested forcing the kids of Japan to kill each other as a kind of legislative poison pill, and through a series of parliamentary procedural events that nobody alive can particularly remember, it got passed into law. 50 years after the fact, it kept going simply because they had accepted it as a fact of life, which I think is a critique of how entrenched some of the more fucked up aspects of Japanese culture are

You don't remember the first episodes of Squid Game then - it's very clearly explained to you. The main character has a gambling problem, lost his job and has taken money from loan sharks who threaten to take a kidney and eye to sell if he doesn't pay up. He also has a mum who is late stage diabetic who can't afford amputation surgery or treatment, particularly as he cancelled the insurance for gambling money.

The antihero used Futures and committed fraud in a company, with the police after him and significant debts to repay as well.

That's why contestants in squid game join - they're all in so much debt that theyve even signed away rights to their body. That's why the contestants can get in and choose to stay.

Another part of this history is the Machinima "Minecraft Survival Games" youtube series (Inspired by The Hunger Games) and the Hunger Games minigames that popped up in Minecraft servers in the early 2010s in the wake of that.

Also years for both for me (I probably read and watched them in 2003), but your impression of the two is the exact same as mine.

Sounds a bit like The Tenth Victim, a delightful specimen of 60s Italian science fictiony pop weirdness.

There’s literally hundreds of shows and movies.

What some people have missed is that this is its own sub-genre of horror.

You have shows like Alice in Borderland that doesn’t get nearly enough love (and is far better than Squid Games in my opinion).

Cube is a late 90s movie that’s on this theme too. You could argue the SAW movies are too, though I’m not personally a fan of those.

There are also plenty of comics on this theme too. The aforementioned Alice in Borderlands is based on a manga by the same title.

I've been waiting for someone to mention Liars' Game! When I started watching Squid Game that's the direction I hoped it was going in. Still good, and season 2 seems to be more in that vein than the first was. But in general I'm a huge fan of stuff that makes you wonder "how are they going to game their way out of it this time?"

[..]Squid Game’s creator Hwang Dong-hyuk openly admits to taking inspiration from Battle Royale[..]

To be fair, they seem to also name Liar Game, as also Kaiji.

his movie was very bad and simplistic while human nature is a deep topic. almost a caricature of a movie. the same year, on the same topic, in the same country, Burning was released. Highly recommend

Isn't it the same actress?

But it suffers from being an adaptation of a Stephen King's book.

King is really good at making you live through the eyes of his protagonists. Which is really hard to do in movies. Same thing with Shining were you follow Jack's fall to craziness from his PoV. And the same thing will happen with "The Long Walk", another great novel which I recommend if you like the death game theme.

They left a pretty heavy cliff-hangar in the very last few minutes of the last episode.

I always thought AiB was inspired on Squid Game, surprised to hear it predates it! Love the series, it doesn't get the attention it deserves in the genre.

And the Zero Escape games.

The motive is "kill or be killed" and the only way to survive is to be the last one standing after 3 days.

Quintet was: “Terrible, boring, and pointless” - Q. Tarantino

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/quentin-tarantino-robert-altman...