Currently the “in” thing in videogaming is the Battle Royale, where a large group of people (usually 100) are dropped on a map and have to scavenge weapons and loot in a bid to be the last one standing, with a gradually decreasing area of play forcing people together so you can’t just camp somewhere. Fortnite, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Apex Legends are the current big names. The name comes from the excellent Takeshi Kitano 2000 film Battle Royale which follows the same idea.
A few nights ago this was joined rather unexpectedly by Tetris 99 on Nintendo Switch, play Tetris online against 98 other players, clear your junk and send your lines to others to force them out of the game which gradually speeds up as fewer players remain until one person is left standing. I have some issues with the control layout, but the idea is kind of ingenious and fun.
Of course, one of the earliest quiz versions of the idea happened over ten years previous with proto-Millionaire Everybody’s Equal.
But it wasn’t the first of course, Ultra Quiz did it first in the eighties. There are some Japanese editions on Youtube, but here are the titles of the 1980s ITV one:
Although you could very reasonably argue Ultra Quiz is too structured to be a true Battle Royale, and is closer to an And Then There Were None format.
isint the purest form of the ” And Then There Were None” format The mole (and also whodunnit, cuz it actually involves murder?…. i miss that show. its the reason i got into zero escape and danganronpa in the first place)
In news, Nickelodeon is reviving are you smarter than a 5th grader in the us with JOHN CENA as host.
http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news/2019/02/14/nickelodeon-brings-back-are-you-smarter-than-a-5th-grader-john-cena-to-host-all-new-version-of-the-hit-family-game-show-382004/20190214nickelodeon04/
The announcement was part of upfront this week.
Perhaps they’ll use syndicated format for this one.
and by the way, hq trivia is the #1 quiz battle royale game, IMO.
I’m surprised the idea of a Battle Royale, probably with fewer contestants, hasn’t been done in the UK yet using trackers on the contestants and paintball guns (or laserquest guns if you want)
I think the closest we ever got to that was X-Fire, but that was just a team of 6 doing ‘missions’ against bad guys. I suppose something like a real-life Battle Royale could be the next big thing.
I’d completely forgotten about X-Fire, I loved that back then, it had a similar kind of feel to many video games of the time.
I’d be surprised if a real life Battle Royale format isn’t already being worked on, there’s probably going to be at least 1 thing like that this year. It would be very hard to have 100 contestants in that, both technically and for the viewers to follow, what would be about the right number? Depends on the size of the playing area I suppose.