With a battle cry go forth which is "Give the people what they want"
And what the people want could only be the senseless slaughter of the gutter-slime that litters this nation for cash and prizes
Yes, this is the show where people bet their lives to win something big
'cause when your life is shit, then you haven't got much to lose on SLAUGHTERAMA!
And what the people want could only be the senseless slaughter of the gutter-slime that litters this nation for cash and prizes
Yes, this is the show where people bet their lives to win something big
'cause when your life is shit, then you haven't got much to lose on SLAUGHTERAMA!
— GWAR, "Slaughterama"
The Game Show Appearance from Hell. The characters are forced to compete in a dangerous contest where if they lose, they die. Tends to lend itself better to film than television, since a filmmaker can kill off characters with impunity.
It's common for these stories to take place 20 Minutes into the Future, and under a corrupt government, in order to Handwave the fact that they're basically murdering people for sport. Usually, the game is televised to legions of bloodthirsty people hungry for Bread and Circuses, thus raising the question: Who are the real murderers? The contestants fighting for survival, or the spectators cheering them on? note
A post-modern take on the Deadly Game is to frame it as Reality TV, à la Survivor, and a subtrope of Immoral Reality Show.
A Sub-Trope of Player Elimination for when elimination is fatal. A type of Public Execution. May contain a Duel to the Death or a Forced Prize Fight. Hunting the Most Dangerous Game is related, but generally lacks the "contest" element, and usually doesn't contain quite so much social commentary. A Blood Sport is a Deadly Game version of a modern spectator sport. Usually has a crew of Condemned Contestants. For an ancient counterpart, see Gladiator Games. For a deadly game that involves luck instead of skill, see Lottery of Doom, Deadly Game of Chance, and Absurdly High-Stakes Game. Sub-Trope of Involuntary Battle to the Death. Super-Trope of Battle Royale Game.
Not to be confused with the TV series Deadly Games.
Example subpages:
Other examples:
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Advertising
- "Wheel of Misfortune"
, a Public Service Announcement released by Land Transport New Zealand, portrays failing to give way at an intersection before proceeding through it as a wheel handled by a mysterious bearded man who spins it for those foolish enough to do it, leading either into a near miss, a minor or major crash, or, aptly enough, outright death for the victim. One of them ends with the driver managing to avert the spin just by doing the right thing and waiting until it's safe to go, all three sending the message that bad calls on intersections can indeed be deadly, and it's better to play it safe and wait.
Audio Plays
- Side Two of The Firesign Theatre's Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him album includes a sketch of a game show called "Beat the Reaper", in which the contestant must identify the deadly disease he's been injected with in time to receive the antidote before it kills him.
Comic Books
- The televised battles of downtown Chicago's "poli-clubs" serve as this in American Flagg!.
- The entire premiss of Avengers Arena has teen heroes off Marvel being forced into one of these at the machinations of the villain Arcade. The first few covers contain homages to several other series using this trope.
- Deadpool: Games of Death sends the merc with a mouth on a retrieval mission on an underground game show where contestants fight for their survival against the daily challenges, as well as the deadly traps contained within.
- Exquisite Corpses: Every five years on Halloween night, the thirteen richest families in America decide who gets to lead The Conspiracy by putting on one of these. Each family (other than the previous winner) is assigned a weapon and must find somebody to wield it, usually a Serial Killer. Those they choose are taken to a small town where over the course of the night they kill each other until only one is left. Most of the families aren't particularly interested in winning and instead entertain themselves with side bets such as "Whose killer can get the biggest civilian body count?"
- Futurama: An early issue has Who's Dying To Be A Millionaire, where after getting into the high-numbers, a very large death ray is used on contestants who get answers wrong, starting with a hippie, much to Bender's joy. Unsurprisingly, Morbo is the host, and Mom is behind it. Fry enters, and is saved from certain death only because of Scruffy's "reading material".
- In Joker's Asylum, the Joker takes over an ordinary game show, with the intention of making it one of these, by killing anyone who gets the questions wrong. It turns out the Joker, for once, had no intention of killing anyone. He just likes terrifying the contestants, who believe he is going to kill them, and is actually recording the producer, who is ordering his people to keep the police out in the hopes the Joker will kill someone, as it will boost their ratings. The point was to show how messed up the producer and the people at home watching the show are for going along with him.
- Judge Dredd:
- This showed up on at least three separate occasions; one early story featured an underground game show entitled 'You Bet Your Life' where stupid, greedy saps wagered the lives of their closest loved ones (and their own) on trivia questions. A later story had a failed game show host put his old rivals through a crazy contest with endless fatal results "Congratulations! You win a golden bullet!" BAM! A third story saw a quiz show where a contestant's correct answers would let him to pick a number between 1 and 10 which would spring a booby trap in his rival contestant's own city block, one of the numbers triggering a flesh disintegrator planted beneath their own seat; the show's host didn't particularly care if correct answers were actually given though and would let contestants pick a number, anyway.
- Actual wars between cities in Dredd are sometimes conducted as a Deadly Game between small teams of Judges representing each city, as a less-destructive alternative to nuking still more of the planet. Such wars are always televised, complete with running sportscaster-style commentary.
- The Lobo story "Unamerican Gladiators" features a deadly game show taking part on a planet that was a gigantic violence-themed theme park. The contestants had to complete a number of tasks, trying to kill each other while avoiding deadly traps... as well as answer some quiz questions to win valuable prizes.
- In Red Robin Tim ends up stuck between two assassin groups, the Council of Spiders and the League of Assassins, after the Spiders decide it would be a fun game to try and murder a bunch of League ninjas and kill Ra's al Ghul.
- The Simpsons:
- Homer has landed in at least one of these, "Burnsimoto's Castle". Three guesses who produced it.
"This game show, banned in every state except our state and, of course, Utah, will soon send three convicts, two mental patients, a homeless guy, a circus freak and one lazy couch potato to unspeakable and untimely deaths. In this reporter's opinion, just the touch of Darwinism our society needs."
- Another comic has Mr. Burns take part in a version of America's Got Talent where he gets to release the hounds on contestants whose performances he disapproves of.
- Homer has landed in at least one of these, "Burnsimoto's Castle". Three guesses who produced it.
- In Ultimate Marvel, Krakoa is an island where mutant criminals are hunted down as a televised (and/or online) series. The X-Men end up there twice, and one time Spider-Man gets pulled along with them.
- ...and, of course, Mojo's Mojoworld, where the X-Men ended up anytime somebody wanted to make fun of television. Arcade's Murderworld also fits the bill, usually involving some kind of giant pinball machine. For the record? Mojo is a morbidly obese blob with mechanical spider legs and Arcade wears a leisure suit and wide polka-dot bowtie. You decide which is more repulsive.
- Sort of mentioned in a story arc of Wolverine by Frank Tieri. It featured a version of Survivor set in Alaska. When an ancient Francophile vampire wizard showed up and started killing the contestants, the network boss thought it made a great show that could boost the slipping sales. If only the vampire could contain himself and would only eat the people voted off...
Comic Strips
- In the Modesty Blaise arc "Those About to Die", elite athletes and combatants (including Modesty and Willie) are kidnapped by an insane millionaire and forced to compete in gladiatorial games for his amusement.
Fan Works
- Cuanta Vida heavily implies that this is why the RED and BLU teams are in "2fort".
- Despair Island reimagines Total Drama Island as one illegally organized by Chris with the help of a corrupt Canadian government official with connections to the Serbian mafia. This time, all the contestants are competing for the right to remain alive, with everyone voted out being killed in a different manner.
- The titular game in Mirai SMP has the diary holders competing for godhood, with the only way of being eliminated being death.
- In The Lion King Adventures, the Series Four story The Interceptor revolves around this trope. It doubles as a parody of a similarly named game show, too.
- Total Drama: Pomewin Island is a second Total Drama example, a similar concept to the above though rather than being a reimagining it instead takes place after the Ridonculous Race season and features a cast that mixes contestants from each of the show's prior seasons. All of those competing have little idea about the true nature of the game until they bare witness to the first elimination. What's worse is that in both versions, it's highly implied that should the game go as intended, they won't even have a true "winner"
Films — Live-Action
- In 13 Sins, contestants are charged with 13 tasks of increasing deadliness with increasing rewards. Quitting at any time forfeits all of the cash. Contestants are observed via the ubiquitous security cameras.
- 13 Tzameti (and the American remake 13) features competitive Russian Roulette. The protagonist takes the place of a contestant, but has no idea what's involved until it's too late to back out.
- In Rob Zombie's 31 contestants have to kill their opponents or survive within a period of twelve hours to 'win' the game.
- Are You Scared has six teenagers kidnapped and taken to a warehouse, where they're put on a game show with deadly challenges tailored around their greatest fears.
- The Belko Experiment starts when 80 white-collar Americans are locked in their office building located in Bogotá, Colombia. The doors and windows are sealed and armed guards patrol the outside, ensuring nobody gets in or out. A mysterious voice occasionally comes in over the intercom, giving them instructions about how many of their co-workers they need to murder in a set amount of time and how many will be killed if they don't comply. To make matters worse, there are small explosives planted in the backs of everyone's heads, which is how the masterminds can kill both failed players and anyone trying to break the rules.
- Black Rat: The Black Rat apparently prepared 'elimination games' for each of the six students, promising to let them live if they succeed in the challenge. Takashi has to block her shot on goal, and Kanako has to score 100 on a karaoke game. They both fail, and it is never revealed what the other four tests would have been.
- The prisoners in Breathing Room are told that they're in a Deadly Game and that one of them will earn their freedom. It's actually a rigged training exercise for deep cover operatives.
- The Condemned (2007) keeps the setting in the present day, and handwaves the legal issues of it by putting the proceedings on a deserted island, and broadcasting them via the Internet.
- Deadball: The Pterodactyl Gauntlets discover that their baseball game against St. Black Dahlia High School is actually a deadly game with a figure skating style scoring system awarding points to the various kills of opposing players.
- Deathrow Gameshow: Prisoners on death-row compete in deadly games for a chance at a reprieve.
- Escape Room (2019): The titular Escape Room is a Saw-esque challenge, in which six people are trapped in a closed room littered with deadly traps. In contrast to most Saw traps (and similarly to the Fatal Five's Trial in Saw V), everyone must cooperate to proceed, but the unforgiving nature of the game always means that someone will die in a given challenge, eliminating the contestants one by one anyway. The end of the film reveals that the one shown in the film is merely the latest of many challenges that have been held for years, and they were created to please the rich. Also, nobody is supposed to win, because the last survivor will be summarily executed by the game master. Fortunately, it turns out that there is one other survivor, who then tag teams with the other survivor to rig the game so they can live.
- The 2011 film Freerunner is a Deadly Game run for the amusement of bored plutocrats around the world who bet on the survival of the Freerunners.
- The 2019 film Funhouse is about a fictional Big Brother-esque 24 hour livestream reality show, Furcas' House of Fun. Hosted by the titular CGI panda avatar, the contestants are forced to earn as many likes as possible from the general public, else they'll be forced to play in penalty games that, more often than not, results in gruesome deaths for those who fail.
- Since the purpose of Funny Games is to poke fun at people's consumption of Torture Porn, the Deadly Game trope is deconstructed in many fronts.
- Contrary to many Saw-inspired movies with elaborated Deadly Games with complex rules and elaborated scenery, the "games" are quite uninspired Sadistic Choices ("Undress yourself or we hurt your son") with no other purpose but to humilliate the protagonists. The suckiness of the games is intentional: it serves to characterize Paul and Peter as two Psychopathic Manchildren with a twisted sense of humor (rather than some criminal masterminds) and the games like thinly veiled excuses to cause harm (rather than an awesome Ironic Hell or a chance to get rich).
- There's also the fact that the protagonists struggle a lot. We spend more time seeing the family trying to resist their captors than playing the "games" they propose.
- The captors have no intention of playing fair. Normally, we take as granted that if the protagonists accomplished the task the Game Master said, they were left alone. Not here, where Paul constantly changes the rules to make sure Ann never wins. One of Ann's final tasks (with the prize being that she decided how everything ended) was to recite a prayer. She did, and then Paul demanded her to pray in a more "affectionate" way. She did, and then Paul demanded her to kneel while praying. She did, and then Paul demanded her to pray backwards. They never had any intention to keep them alive.
- The 2009 movie Gamer starring Gerard Butler. Death row convicts can allow themselves to be implanted with Nanomachines that allow someone else to control their motor functions. If that someone else is good enough to make it through 30 battles with them, they are released. However, the true terrors are the others in the game, normal inmates who are stuck looping silly behaviors like sweeping up the battlefield or flashing their breasts to the audience. However, the movie focuses on something else after thirty minutes.
- The German TV movie "Das Millionenspiel" from 1970 is about a man who has to survive seven days while being hunted by a gang of killers. Prize if he survives: One million German marks. The population can help him or rat him out, as they like. Some people took the film for real and asked whether they could become either the candidate or the hunters. Unfortunately, for legal reasons the movie was forbidden to be broadcast for almost thirty years (had to do with being based on the Short Story "Prize Of Peril" by Robert Sheckley.)
- O'Dessa has Plutonovich's game show "The One", where, as he sings in his villain song, once you're onstage you dance for your life. Displeasing him means a deadly face job that renders people braindead.
- In Once Upon a Spy, Big Bad Marcus Valorium drops Paige Tannehill in The Maze under his headquarters and forces to her play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse (or 'Cat-and-Canary' as he keeps referring to it) against his henchmen Rudy and Greta, with the understanding that they will kill her if they catch her. He guides Rudy and Greta via radio, while Jack Chenault guides Paige. Sore Loser Valorium explains that he regards this as settling the score for Chenault beating him for a scientific award 12 years ago.
- In one of the last cities in the frozen, dying world of Quintet, the people occupy themselves with a tournament based on the eponymous board game, for lack of anything else to do while waiting for humanity to die out.
- Rollerball: The highest number of deaths during a game is nine, according to a Rollerball statistics fan. This is before the rule changes introduced during the film.
- The Running Man (1987): See entry under Literature for details. It seemed the dystopian future setting had more televised games like the eponymous one; there was a commercial for another game called Climbing for Dollars, where a contestant is climbing a rope over a pit filled with angry Dobermans while he is pulling money off of the rope. Partway up, a pipe would blast the contestant with gas to try and make him fall.
- The Saw series is based entirely around "games" where people are forced to either mutilate themselves/harm others or die painfully.
- In Shredder Orpheus, Orpheus's second chance to save Eurydice is framed as a game show where one door leads to Eurydice, while the other leads to his death. Eurydice isn't behind either door, so he's doomed no matter what.
- Slashers, about a Japanese game show producing an All-American special episode. Contestants entered a maze-like paintball course, converted for ambiance, to try to outlive three Axe-Crazy, crowd-pleasing professional maniacs. The one and only camera was also a character, the game show's cameraman, provoking a lot of observations whenever the contestants became aware of him.
- Stream is about a crime ring that stages one of these at a hotel, where they rig up the building with webcams, lock all the doors, and set four psychopaths loose to kill everyone else inside for the entertainment of people watching on their underground livestream. The psychos are the ones competing, scoring extra points for particularly stylish and/or brutal kills, while the viewers get to place bets on how the carnage will unfold.
- Video games in the TRON universe are where hapless Programs (and displaced Users) get sent to get killed for the entertainment of other Programs (and, as implied in the first film, for arcade players in the analog world, who have no idea what they are actually doing)!
- Turkey Shoot:
- Football played with large jugs of gasoline. Which are chained to a prisoner.
- The 2014 film has the entire story revolve around one, with convicted murderers hunted for sport on a TV show.
- Would You Rather focuses on a woman named Iris who is lured into deadly games based on the 'would you rather' party game in order to secure her brother's leukemia treatment.
Gamebooks
- The Citadel of Chaos: The titular citadel houses a Games Room which seems designed to kill or horribly injure anyone foolish enough to partake in their games. You can choose between Knifey-Knifey - a Russian Roulette played with 6 daggers, five spring-loaded ones and a real one - or Ruddlestones, a Grenade Hot Potato where you and a few contenders passes a stone containing an explosion spell that can blow up randomly, which deals severe SKILL and STAMINA damage if it explodes in your hands.
Music
- GWAR: "Slaughterama," as mentioned in the page quote is GWAR manager/drug dealer Sleazy P Martini's game show - where the prize is an undisclosed sum of money, the answer time is one second and the punishment is death. Its contestants? A hippie, a hair metal musician and a Neo-Nazi. Their prizes? The hippie gets shot in the mouth, the hair metal musician gets his face ripped off, and the Neo-Nazi gets decapitated.
Podcasts
- The Adventure Zone: Balance has Wonderland from The Suffering Game arc. Run by two elves (actually liches), the place is more or less a gameshow designed to draw as much pain and suffering from the contestants as possible. Which the liches sustain themselves on. Unlike most other examples on this page, there's no winner: participants are lured in by promises of great wealth, then given false hope to keep them playing, so that they continue to suffer for as long as possible.
Puppet Shows
- Muppets Tonight has a variation on this with the "Swift Wits" segments. The contestant’s lives aren’t what’s on the line- rather, if they lose, a completely defenseless animal will be eaten alive by Big Mean Carl. Unfortunately, all of the contestants are hopelessly incompetent, so this always happens. The one time someone does actually win the game, Carl defies the host’s orders and eats the animal anyway, and then eats the contestant, causing the trope to be played straight.
Roleplays
- Hunger Games Simulation is a Play-by-Post Game on the TV Tropes Forum Games subsection. It's a simulator of The Hunger Games, where the participants nominate their own tributes and submit various events. As the seasons progressed, more and more silly custom events were implemented, and some of the tributes started to become... unorthodox by Simulation standards.
- Journal Roleplay has "murdergames," short-term games in which an assortment of characters from various worlds are trapped in some setting and informed that the only way out is to get away with murder. The genre began with Dangan Roleplay, which was based on the Danganronpa franchise.
- The entire premise of Survival of the Fittest Mini is a series of deadly games, set in various universes and taking a variety of forms including a traditional battle royale featuring mundane high school students, an Immoral Reality Show where a wide audience tunes in to watch murder as entertainment, an illegal experiment dosing victims with Super Serum and forcing them to fight, and a simulation Inside a Computer System set in a cartoonish facsimile of The Wild West.
Tabletop Games
- The titular Splinter in Splinter (2012) is one of these, combined with elements of dungeon crawling and reality TV.
- Suerte y Muerte is a Deadly Game television series broadcast out of Aztlan in the Shadowrun Verse. Other Blood Sport programs certainly exist, but S y M is noted for making killing out the other contestants mandatory to win.
- Another bloody game is Desert Wars, which emerged out of two armies fighting in the nuked remains of Tripoli and soon became a television sensation. Armies, corporate and national and mercenary, take part in the show, but only one of their tournaments has fully lethal rules of engagement.
- And then there's court ball, the national sport of Aztlan that follows in the Aztec tradition. It's not directly lethal, but losing captains tend to vanish mysteriously...
- XCRAWL is an extensive supplement for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, later extended into a standalone game under the umbrella of Dungeon Crawl Classics, in which the base game meets Smash TV. The party crawls through dungeons, slaying monsters, collecting loot, and saving non-combatants (like "Princesses" hired to act out the roles) for the ratings. And yes, it's televised. And your DM is perfectly justified giving out a year's supply of car wax as a prize (along with actual stuff you can use-the book advises this). The Deadly part comes in where if you die, not only do you die, but you lose points.
- Classroom Deathmatch is basically the Serial Numbers Filed Off version of Battle Royale: The Role-Playing Game.
Theme Parks
- Halloween Horror Nights Orlando has the RUN series of houses. The original from 2001 saw Eddie Schmidt, the Icon of HHN that year, build a twisted "game show" in which people were kidnapped and forced to escape a junkyard labyrinth while being hunted by psychos. Its 2006 sequel Run: Hostile Territory was less of an example, being based more on the film Hostel than anything, but the 2015 house RUN: Blood, Sweat and Fears went all-in on it, complete with an '80s retro-apocalypse theme inspired by The Running Man (1987) in the form of arenas filled with bright lights and neon, the killers having their own themes to them, and a setting that made reference to "the Corporate States of America" and "the Irradiated Soviet Wasteland".
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa is entirely based around this trope, with each game having a group of high school students trapped in a remote location and being forced into playing a sick game designed by Killer Teddy Bear Monokuma. The only way to escape is to murder one of your classmates and get away with it. After a murder, the students are given an amount of time to investigate, followed by a class trial where they argue over who the "blackened" culprit is and then put it to a vote. If they get it right, the blackened is executed in spectacular fashion and the game continues. If they get it wrong, the blackened "graduates" and goes free, while everyone else is executed instead.
- Euphoria is about a group of people who find themselves inside a facility, and quickly discover that they're playing such a game. The sole male of the group is the designated "Unlocker", with everyone else being "Keyholes". He is then tasked with performing extremely unwholesome acts towards any of the Keyholes according to specific guidelines — the Unlocker must successfully do so five times in a row, or else all players will be killed.
- Exile Election follows a group of twelve people trapped in an amusement park while the outside world is being ravaged by monsters. The group is forced by the park's A.I to hold Exile Elections to vote on who should be exiled outside the park and killed by the monsters. The sister of the protagonist is the very first victim, with nine people overwhelmingly voting for her death, so he decides to use the game to take his revenge.
- Exit/Corners has five people get kidnapped and forced to play a series of strange puzzles in a hotel hosted by Sent, a mysterious entity who seems to sadistically enjoy telling them that they "could die" if they fail to solve his puzzles and also reminding them that the building they're in will get blown up by explosives in 24 hours and kill anyone who's still in it at that time.
- Fatal Twelve has the Divine Selection in which twelve people who died are given a second shot at life by the goddess Parca. The ritual gives the participants twelve weeks to compete in order to undo their deaths. One must eliminate others by gathering information regarding their name, cause of death, and greatest regret in the real world.
- Find Love or Die Trying revolves around a deadly dating reality show, where you must get together with one of the five other contestants before the week is up or you will die. Also, the protagonist is not allowed to tell the contestants about the whole "you will die" thing, or else everyone will die. The option to tell the others about this fact never comes up, however.
- Pacific Dominion revolves around a group of friends whose reunion party is hijacked into a death game. The death game challenges the friends to correctly identify the killer among them, if they fail, more murders will occur. The game is divided into rounds with certain stages eith their own rules.
- PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo: The mastermind behind the Feast of Shadows sets it up in order so that strongly bereaved people in Sumida will receive Curse Stones that could allow them to revive their loved ones... by killing other people and collecting the dregs of their souls, and it so happens that Curse Bearers give way more in the way of soul dregs than ordinary folks. This pits the several Curse Bearers against each other in a tense game of cat-and-mouse across the city... whether or not an individual Curse Bearer wants to kill, they can't be sure that the other bearers don't want to kill them.
- In Quantum Suicide a group of researchers tasked with finding humanity a new home among the stars are forced to play the spaceship's corrupted A.I system's "Deletion Game", in which it forces them to play a different game against each other each week, with the losing crewmember being executed.
- In Raging Loop, the Feast is an event that occurs in a remote mountain settlement in Japan whenever a mountain god curses a handful of people to transform into monsters during the night. The villagers must gather ritually each day to try to deduce who among them are the beasts, voting to execute them before they are all killed. It's practically "What if Werewolf (1997) was a visual novel?" However, the protagonist - an outsider to the town - has the advantage of being stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop and able to use his memories of failed outcomes in order to find the route to survival.
- Tsunagari Chess School centers around a Future Diary-esque (complete with Shout-Out) one of these. 16 students of the titular school were chosen by the God of Time and Space, and must kill each other until 1 is left, the winner getting their biggest desire granted. They each have a cell phone that can ping them once a day to check for other phone bearers, and if the phone is destroyed, they die.
- Yet Another Killing Game: Three girls wake up in an unfamiliar house with no way out aside from the front door which states it'll only open after one of them dies with the text later updating to say that they only have 20 hours left. Cue the tension and different bad ends. They're trapped in an Eldritch Location and the Big Bad only needs one more death to open the way out. However, one of the girls is also a Groundhog Peggy Sue who is suffering from Time Loop Fatigue, but subconsciously won't let herself or her friends die no matter how much she wants the loop to end. To that end, she accepts the Big Bad's proposal to be possessed by a spirit from hell, the Amnesiac Hero, in the hopes that the timeloops stop and accepting whoever the protagonist chooses to kill to finally end things.
- Your Turn to Die has the Death Game. In the Main Game, the group votes on one person who they think should die. It's divided into a 70-minute-long preliminary round, where they debate on and select a group that seems the most suspicious or least cooperative, followed by a 20-minute-long final round where one person of those initially voted for is selected to die. Of course, to make things harder, every participant is also randomly assigned one of four roles:
- Commoner - A normal player. Has no unique abilities.
- The Keymaster - If the Keymaster is voted to die, then everyone else will also die with them. This will happen even if there's a tie for first, as the Keymaster role takes priority.
- The Sage - Knows who the Keymaster is through divination, but can't lie about the results.
- The Sacrifice - If someone else is voted to die, the Sacrifice will also die with them. However, if the Sacrifice is voted or there's a tie for first (excluding the Keymaster), then they'll be allowed to escape the game with one person of their choosing at the cost of everyone else. They also get two votes during the game itself.
- Yurukill: The Calumniation Games pairs its participants into teams with one Prisoner (two Prisoners in the Death Dealing Duo team) and one Executioner. While the people in each team are expected to work together to accomplish their goals (the team who wins will have the Prisoner's criminal record erased and acquitted, while the Executioner will be granted a wish as their prize), the Executioners have the power to determine the guilt of the Prisoners, to either pardon or execute their teammate — and some of them may be more tempted to punish their Prisoner partners than to actually win the game...
- This is a staple of the Zero Escape series. In each game there's a Deadly Game with different rules, mechanics, participants and masterminds. Specifically:
- Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the very first installment, has the Nonary Game. Nine people have to risk their lives to explore a ship so they can find the exit, a door with a number 9 on it. Possible ways to die involve drowning when the time limit for the game is up, being killed by other participants, and the detonators in the bracelets triggering an explosion inside a hapless rulebreaker... in the bombs implanted in the bowels of all the players. Flipped on its head come The Reveal — only two of the nine players actually have bombs, and the game is designed for all players to make it out alive while saving Akane from an actual Deadly Game in the process.
- The Nonary Game makes a reappearance in Virtue's Last Reward, and is deadlier than before. The participants find the number 9 door right off the bat, but in order to open it they need to rack up 9 bracelet points, which are obtained through a variation of the Prisoner's Dilemma called the AB Game (which stands for "Ally" and "Betray")... And this little game is what can kill off the participants if their points get down to zero, injecting them with a lethal dose of muscle relaxant, suffocating them. Considering how the characters don't really trust each other, it seems like it's impossible for all 9 people to escape... but once again, the game is designed for everyone to make it out alive. Even if only one person escapes through the number 9 door and strands everyone else, their escape means the game is over, and all doors in the building except the number 9 door become unlocked for the convenience of the remaining people... including the door identical to the number 9 door located one floor down. Sure, it can only be opened from the outside, but if the escapee was aware of this and feeling generous enough, they could let everyone else out with them (assuming the game being over also means their bracelets will no longer kill them if they try to leave the facility with less than 9 points).
- At its deadliest in Zero Time Dilemma's Decision Game, where at least six people must die for anyone to escape. Each player has a password associated with them, which is announced upon their death, and a combination of any six of these passwords will open the exit. And there's no trick to circumvent these deaths this time around either — the game shows how the exit really does only open with six deaths. C-Team attempts to get around this by deliberately killing themselves to learn what their passes are and then shifting to a different timeline in order to put them in, only for the computer to straight-up tell them that passes from other timelines will not work and then sic a Killer Robot on them for trying to be smartasses. However... the characters make it out alive of Dcom by not getting trapped behind the X-Door in the first place. Yes, the only way for everyone to live is for Zero to release them at the very beginning of the videogame. Of course, this group of characters proceed to have their consciousnesses swapped with the versions of them that did get trapped, which puts them right in the middle of the facility as it's about to blow up. So yes, at least six people must die for the characters to escape, even if it means all nine of them throw their own alternate timeline counterparts under the bus to do it.
- The Zodiac Trial: Twelve people are kidnapped and brought to an abandoned school where they're told to play the Zodiac Race: every 45 minutes, they must make a private vote on how to move their game piece and the first people to reach the end go free while everyone else is executed. Since they have to cover 24 game spaces in 12 rounds, they have to search around the school for trinkets that affect the game in different ways. After the third round though, it also turns into a Social Deduction Game as two people are assigned traitor roles; one traitor only wins if they reach the end with 2 or less other people while the second traitor wants to be in last place when the race ends with 8 or less people finishing which causes them and the other traitor to be the only winners.
Webcomics
- In 8-Bit Theater, Fighter participates in a game called Drownball that consists of four people being tossed into an enclosed sphere of water and left to drown, and whose motto is "Four contestants enter, nobody exits". Fighter wins by surviving, somehow.
- In usr/bin/w00t, Sarah leads one of those in a Dream Sequence, featuring people who are "asshats" to computer techs.
- DICE: The Cube That Changes Everything: Once there are 16 A-Rankers, X reveals the next quest: Player Versus Player, and the first to collect the 6 A-Dice set will get any wish. Later it gets upgraded to There Can Be Only One for all Dicers.
- Domain Tnemrot is set around one of these. The battles are to the death.
- In Dead Winter, a large group of rich people is apparently behind a game of world-renowned assassins hunting each other for sport, with the assassins and their sponsors getting the bounty when they kill on of the other participants. Apparently not all of the assassins are in the game because they want to be.
- In Jix, Lauren is abducted by the Amblians (a race similar to Jix's race, the Ambis) for a galactic show called "The Gauntlet" where the contestants are unwilling aliens captured from various planets and hunted down by the hosts. The show was cancelled when Jix came in to rescue her friend.
- The second season of #Killstagram is about a phantom assassin game. Thirteen people are forced to hide from the phantom assassin or be killed. Then they vote on who they think is the assassin, and that person is also killed.
- Last Res0rt centers around a Reality Show of the same name.
- Word of God says that players' deaths, while advertised as a selling point, are merely "encouraged" by the rules of the show (which specify that anyone who survives the season will be pardoned of all their crimes, including those committed during the show).
- This is how morphE starts. The losers die. The winners turn into something a little different...
- This is the main plot vehicle in Hell(p). Every five years Hell's government hosts a big game where multiple teams compete for a chance to return back to life. The story is set during one of the special games where the main prize is a ticket to Heaven instead. This being Hell, the games are as brutal as it gets.
- In Nodwick, there are the Hench-Games, an annual event run by the Adventurers Guild, which are actually perfectly safe for the contestants. However, the games are played using henchmen as equipment, and it's not so safe for them. (Suffice to say that, while this attracts a lot of spectators, those with heart conditions are not advised to watch the javelin toss.) It includes such events as hench-vaulting, synchronized looting, high seas pillaging, dodge curse, trapped-chest handling, and the 200-meter dash-with-cash-a-thon. (The villains try to win by using a henchman shaped golem, which unfortunately, is not considered cheating by the Guild, who encourage dirty tricks in this reality.)
- Serix: These are shown to be widely popular forms of entertainment in the future, with most participants being volunteers. An In-Universe commercial asking people to sign up for "The Risol Tournament Death Games" has its roster filled before the commercial even ends. It helps that cloned backup bodies are cheap and common in the setting.
- In Undead Friend, the main plot centers around a supernatural mobile game called Undead Friend where the characters have to travel to an alternative layer of reality and kill monsters called fiends every week in order to not be erased from existence. If they can manage to win, they get released from the game and the ghost partner gets to come back to life. Nobody has won the game to anyone's knowledge so far though.
- Unsounded: Knock, who cannot read, is caught trying to steal a dog and forced to play a deadly game of hangman despite her protests about her literacy.
Web Original
- VIVINOS' Alien Stage centers around a deadly singing competition, where the loser of each round is killed off by aliens.
- The Annoying Orange's "Foodsplosion" is this to everyone who played it, getting a question wrong means you win, and the prize is getting killed in various ways, such as getting shredded with a chainsaw or having a hammer hit you straight in the face.
- The Devil Game is about a set of instructions should you dare to summon the Devil to play a game of truth or dare. If you win, the Devil will be obliged to say the correct answer to any question you pose, but if you lose, he will be free to lie to you. You do not have to sell your soul (though he is all too happy to take yours if you offer). The game has many rules, and breaking each one will cause a fatal outcome for you.
- The in-universe Show Within a Show version of Kamp Kraven has the titular Kraven the Hunter pitting five men against each other in the ultimate challenge to prove one's masculinity, forcing them to survive the wilderness and later train with each other in order to recruit the last man standing, with Kraven killing those he deems unworthy or just another part of his "hunt."
- The Life SMP functions this way.
- In general, players are dropped into a small Minecraft world with a limited number of lives (3 in most seasons, between 2 and 6 in its second season, and 6 in its sixth and seventh seasons), indicated by the color of their username, and their skins should the player choose to do so (with 4+ lives they're dark green, with 3 lives they're light green, with 2 lives they're yellow and with 1 life they're red). Greens and Yellows can't directly attack one another, and typically form alliances and a rudimentary society, while those on their final lives, dubbed the Reds, become bloodthirsty, with as mission to kill as many people as they can. Inevitably, the game ends with only one winner.
- The fourth season comes with a change in game mechanism, with Colour-Coded for Your Convenience applying to the time limit of life a player has left (out of 24 hours) instead, and Yellows are allowed to attack Greens. In spite of the more drastic changes, the overall nature of the series is fundamentally the same.
- Minilife TV: The episode "Chris and Ian Shamelessly Promote Themselves" provides a subversion with @midflight. The premise is a game show inside an airplane where the player with the least amount of points after each round gets ejected into shark-infested waters. However, it turns out the show is actually filmed inside a soundstage and the losing contestants are shown hanging out backstage.
- Nazo no Eizou - CM Channel: Implied in "To All Participants", a notice from Government Public Relations. It starts with a message in red congratulating participants for surviving set to a polka rendition of the "If You're Happy and You Know It" nursery rhyme. Then the notice gives information on the next target, a 32-year-old man. As the ad informs the deadline to kill the poor sod is in three days, it cuts to GPR's logo.
- Pantheon SMP: Twelve souls have been brought Back from the Dead and selected as champions for the participating deities, where they will compete in a contest of alliances, conquering, and battles. Each session culminates in players voting on who to send to a Duel to the Death on Mount Olympus, and if a player loses their three lives, they will be returned to the Underworld for eternity. The last player standing wins a wish for anything they desire.
- Paranormal High School: A minor recurring type of video that occurs is the hosting of a death game by a masked man, who commonly asks for people with strong abilities to participate as a form of challenge. Unfortunately for him, it usually ends up going awry, typically by the challengers being too strong.
- SCP Foundation:
- SCP-024 is a mysterious game show which puts its contestants through Death Courses and whose losers are never seen again.
- There's also SCP-263, a black and white TV set made in the 60s that forces whoever turns it on to play a TV gameshow called "Cash or Ash", which requires them to answer obscure questions about variety of subjects related to the enviroment it's in, which naturally involves other SCPs while it's in containment, and wrong answers will cause the contestant to spontaneously combust. The same will also happen if it catches someone coaching the contestant or otherwise cheating, although since the entity acting as the host of the show has no knowledge of technology newer than the object, it's mostly trivial to look up the answers on a smartphone or a tablet that's sufficiently small.
- There is also SCP-2206, which is a series of radio broadcasts from another universe, where the MLB, in addition to being very weird, often has players dying during baseball games.
- SCP-024
- The Kill Box from StickDeath. It's basically a more lethal, and brutal, version of wrestling and MMA where contestants are required to kill their opposition to advance. This is the only instance that feature blue-on-blue fights.
- The Survival of the Fittest program in Survival of the Fittest, which is very similar to that of Battle Royale but with slightly different rules. For example, no time limit as long as there's a death every 24 hours, the names of killers are given on the announcements, and there's a different collar design.
- The podcast The Thrilling Adventure Hour has the Punishment Soccer, a deadly take on soccer and a parody of The Hunger Games in which Pemily Stalwark fought and won.
- WitchCraft SMP: The final battle to determine who becomes the next Supreme Witch is a fight to the death between all candidates, where the last one standing wins. Everyone is only allowed to bring 20 items into the arena with them, not including wearable items like armour and trinkets, alongside the powers they have learnt and accumulated over the eight-week course of the series. Even the arena setup is reminiscent of a Minecraft Survival Games map, as everyone starts on podiums in a circle around a "cornucopia" of chests, which are filled with supplies which may help the Witches, and the border shrinks the longer the battle goes on. The main difference is that those who lose the battle royale aren't Killed Off for Real, but are teleported back to Spawn when the winner is determined.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: The Intergalactic Showdown game show from the hour-length special "Win, Lose and Kaboom" exaggerates this trope. The winner gets a new car! The losers get to watch their home planet going kaboom. Ultimately, no planets go kaboom thanks to Jimmy fighting against the host/producer.
- Butt-Ugly Martians episode "You Bet Your Planet" gives us Togut, a game involving asteroids. The BUMs have to prevent the asteroid from colliding with a planet, and their opponent Humonga has to ensure the collision. The planet in question is Earth, and Humonga has just as many wins as the BUMs.
- The entire premise of Celebrity Deathmatch.
- Inverted in The Cuphead Show!. The "mystery prize" for winning Roll the Dice, King Dice's radio game show, is having your soul stolen. The show is rigged as hell (literally) so that everyone who enters will win until Cuphead enters and fails simply by being that bad.
- The Hollow: Played with, as while the whole thing turns out to really be a virtual reality game, it was never meant to harm the players' health. However, the game's code does become damaged somehow and the host is legitimately worried by that turn of events potentially killing the players.
- The Justice League episode "Wild Cards," in which Joker hides time bombs all throughout the Las Vegas Strip and uses hidden cameras to film the League racing to find them while simultaneously fighting the Royal Flush Gang.
- Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends: "Seven Little Superheroes" sees the Chameleon try to eliminate each of the various Marvel superheroes in brutal fashion, one-by-one. He uses drones disguised as each of the good guys in a "kill or be killed" game both for his own amusement and to wipe out those who would prevent him from achieving his goals. However, he finds that he can't kill off another little superhero that came along: Miss Lion! Apparently, changing his shape doesn't change his scent and this allowed the heroes to get the drop on him.
- In the Looney Tunes short "The Ducksters", Porky is on a rather sadistic radio quiz show called Truth or AAAAHHH!! (a parody of Truth or Consequences) hosted by Daffy Duck, where Porky has to answer some rather impossible questions or "pay the penalty". These penalties include Porky being crushed by the Rock of Gibraltar, rained upon by Niagara Falls, tied up and blown up with dynamite, pounded with a mallet, threatened by a buzz saw, crushed by a safe, and other forms of abuse. At the end of the short, Porky buys out the station and proceeds to subject Daffy to the same penalties.
- Tiny Toon Adventures
- Plucky and Dizzy compete on a game show called That's Incredibly Stupid, where the idea is to complete tasks you'd have to be incredibly stupid to attempt. Round one is to compete in a demolition derby (without a car), and round two involves finding a needle in a haystack (which is set on fire and has fireworks planted inside). Plucky survives those by putting the brunt of it on Dizzy, but when told the last round is simply to judge a beauty contest, he insists on doing it himself. The host neglects to tell him that the contestants are all of the Amazonian Beauty type, and all are horrible Sore Losers. (Plucky doesn't complete this one; he was a little too stupid.)
- Montana Max and Babs Bunny also compete in a game show called "Win, Lose, or... KERPLOWWY!" which sees its contestants answer trivia questions or suffer humiliating, and often painful, consequences. Naturally Max bribes host Fink Winkleman into helping him beat Babs, but Buster Bunny manages to catch onto their game and turn the tables on the two.
- Montana Max and Elmyra Duff would face off on "Toonywood Squares", which seems to be a normal game show, until Max picks Byron's square, which turns out to be the secret one, which carries a penalty for missing the question, which is to be dropped down a trap door directly into Hades.
- Total Drama: The titular series hosted by Chris McLean zig-zags this. In the first season there were dangerous challenges that could cause the campers to get hurt, but these injuries were really just played for laughs, and the only deaths seen were from random animals that were unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some interns Chris said died setting up the challenges. In later seasons though as Chris went through Flanderization he slowly became The Sociopath, losing whatever little concern he had for the campers' safety and making his challenges as dangerous and potentially deadly as possible. Though no contestants in the various seasons have ever died due to playing the game, it has generally become accepted that joining the show means putting your life at risk and/or enduring being tortured by Chris for the chance to win $1,000,000.
- In The Real Ghostbusters episode "The Devil to Pay", the heroes were conned by a demon named Dib Devlin into competing in a game show with their souls on the line. Unfortunately for Dib (who was clearly a devil behind on his quota) he underestimated their intelligence, and had no faith in human nature, seeing as the last part of the three-part game could be won by one of them admitting to doing something bad. (Which Ray eventually did.) Even worse, he was a Sore Loser who tried to kill them after he lost, but proved a complete wimp once Peter actually got his hands on him.
- The Regular Show episode "Fool Me Twice" has Mordecai, Rigby, and Benson participate in a sadistic Takeshi's Castle expy with a deadly obstacle course and a crazed host who gets to punch them in the face with a lethal amount of force if they don't finish in time. Before they begin the host shows a montage of his previous victims, with a horribly disfigured man being referred to as "the only contestant who didn't die".
- Slugterra: The Shane gang is subjected to this by the Game Master in "The Thrill of the Game". The Game Master's modus operandi is to lure unsuspecting slingers into a far off cavern called Lands End Cavern. There, he forces them to play "game", made up of dangerous obstacles and puzzles.
Real Life
- The gladiatorial matches of Ancient Rome, of course. Not every fight ended with death, only about one in five (a well-trained gladiator is an expensive investment, so it cost a lot to "give the people what they want"), and some gladiators even made their careers on victories that did not draw any blood. Still, most gladiators did die in the ring eventually, usually after no more than ten matches, and the average life expectancy for a gladiator was 27.
- The Mesoamerican ballgame, in a sense. While not fundamentally deadly in itself, there's evidence that the game had a lot to do with the selection of human sacrifices in some civilizations. Historians are still debating on who gets killed, the winning team or the losing team.