It’s Survival Week at TheGamer, and I’ve been thinking about battle royale games. They’re not survival games proper, but they combine a lot of the scavenging, crafting and exploration mechanics of survival games with what are essentially dea✱thmatches in an ever-shrinking safe space. 🐎Battle royale games are part of the legacy of survival games, but I’m more interested in the genre’s namesake.
Before starting this article, I texted my younger brother, an avid gamer who was a teenager when Fortnite came out and therefore much closer to its target demographic. I asked him if he’d ever played ꧑Fortnite, to which he answered that yes, once,🍬 and it’s a “kiddy game”. Fair enough – it is an intentionally family-friendly game rated as appropriate for players as young as 13. I followed up by asking if he’s ever heard of or watched the 2000 film Battle Royale, and got a definitive no.
A sample size of one is not enough to draw definitive conclusions about the consumption habits of a generation. I took statistics, I know that’s bad science. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that t𓃲he majority of Fortnite’s player base would not have heard of, let alone watched, Battle Royale. The most commonly cited data about Fortnite’s demographics claim that over 60 percent of the gam🎶e’s players are 18-24, but that isn’t verified and could easily be skewed by children lying about their ages – actually jumping into the game will reveal that there are plenty of pre-teens playing at any given time.
The Iconic Film
I wasn&rsq🙈uo;t generally watching movies older than I was when I was thirteen, so this isn’t a superiority thing where I say that kids these days are less media literate for not knowing what Battle Royale is. Quite honestly, I just think it’s interesting that the words battle royale mean completely different things to two different generations, and how 🅺Fortnite has sanitised what was originally a horribly gory concept.
When I first watched Battle Royale in my late teens, I was horrified and enraptured in equal measure. My interest in the film came after The Hunger Games blew up and people said that Battle Royale, which came into the 🌞world first as a novel by Koushun Takami in 1999 and then as ෴a Japanese film a year later, was an obvious inspiration.
Also, I’d read that Quentin Tarantino said it was one of his favourite films, and by that age Tumblr had already turned me into a proto-film b﷽ro.
Lest we forget, Battle Royale was a very controversial film when it was released, with the outrage over the film’s release later being compared to the reaction to A Clockwork Orange in the 1970s. When it was released, several countries excluded it from distribution or outright banned it despite its critical acclaim and financial success. The film depicts a middle school class randomly forced to participate in a game called “Battle Royale”, in which they have three days to murder each other until there’s only one child left standing. Anybody who doesn’t follow the rules will be killed by their collars, which are rigged with explosives. Some children refuse to participate, and usually end up dead anyway. A lot of the children kill themselves. Some kill eꦚach other, on purpose or by accident. It’s shocking, it’s bloody, and at times, it’s hard to watch.
Of course, as is often the case, the film was far more complex than the💎 blood-soaked, dead bodies of middle schoolers made it seem. At its core, Battle Royale was about distrust of authority – after all, it’s a totalitarian government that forces the children to kill each other, in an attempt to curb juvenile delinquency. The children must conform to what’s expected of them, or be condemned to death.
The Legacy
Naturally, the rules of the killing spree are much more compelling as a video g🍰ame than themes of anti-authoritarianism, and that’s what battle royale games took from t🐽he source material, starting with mods of games like Minecraft and ARMA 2 and eventually reaching the massively popular mainstream in games like Fortnite Battle Royale, Apex Legends, and PUBG: Battlegrounds.
Fortnite Battle Royale is a cultural phenomenon, and Fortnite as a whole is one of the most profitable games in the industry. How fascinating, and how ironic, that it achieved this amount of success by iterating on a genre based on a movie about children kill🅠ing each other, and creating a game where kids can also kill each other, but virtually, in a perfectly kid-friendly environment. There’s something very disturbing about taking the meaning out of a piece of art and playing out its horrors in miniature, devoid of context. Makes schmoney𓃲, though.
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- Dates
- February 12-18, 2024 🦹
- Genre
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- Nightingale, Enshrouded, ༒Palworld, DayZ, Valheim, ARK: Survival Evolved, Frostpunk, Pacific Drive, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Project Zomboid
Welcome to the home of TheGamer's Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you'll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
