When you hear the words battle royale , most people in 2018 immediately think of the trigger-happy Plunkbat or the cheery Fortnite. But a decade ago, those same words only evoked bleak battles between crying teens, fought on the black-and-white pages of a manga — a Japanese comic.
Art doesn t exist in a vacuum. Creators absorb ideas and translate them to different mediums, in a web of cross-influences and contaminations. That s why to understand the rise of battle royale games, we must start from the cult manga Battle Royale.