thumb|Bare Knuckles, 19th century oil painting by George A. Hayes
A battle royal (, also battle royale) traditionally refers to a fight involving many combatants, usually conducted under either boxing or wrestling rules, where the winner is the one who registers the most wins. In recent times, the term has been used more generally to refer to any fight involving large numbers of people who are not organized into factions. Within combat sports and professional wrestling, the term has a more specific meaning.
Outside sports, the term battle royale has taken on a new meaning in the 21st century, from Koushun Takami's 1999 Japanese dystopian novel Battle Royale and its 2000 film adaptation of the same name, referring to a fictional narrative genre and/or mode of entertainment also known as death games and killing games, where a select group of people is instructed to hunt and kill one another in a large arena until there is only one survivor.
Sports
Historical uses
In 18th century England, bare-knuckle boxing conducted according to Jack Broughton's rules included matches involving eight fighters. Referred to as "Broughton's Battle Royals", these events were spoofed in political cartoons of the era. The practice eventually fell out of favor in the United Kingdom, but it continued in the American colonies. Lower-class white people who lived in the backcountry practiced "free-for-all" as well as rough-and-tumble fighting. The practice also spread to enslaved people in America via their abductors and enslavers, who forced the enslaved into mass fights as a form of entertainment. In a similar vein, Frederick Douglass wrote that practices such as allowing slaves to hunt animals for sport on holidays, as well as consume alcohol and participate in other leisurely activities, were "among the most effective in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection."
After the American Civil War, the battle royal became even more popular, but the events were also increasingly considered shameful and disreputable. Promoters of boxing events arranged for brutal free-for-alls with few rules, generally between black boxers. The audience for these spectacles was almost always white, unlike the pre-war entertainment within the enslaved communities.
The battle royal was a way for an aspiring boxer to get noticed, and successful battle royal champions gained enough prestige to participate in more respectable boxing matches. Jack Johnson, Joe Gans, and Beau Jack are three successful boxers who started out in battles royal. Battle Royale set out the basic rules of the genre, including players being forced to kill each other until there is a single survivor and the need to scavenge for weapons and items. The "battle royale" concept first gained mainstream popularity in Japan, where Battle Royale inspired a wave of manga, anime, and visual novel works during the 2000s, before the concept gained global mainstream popularity in the 2010s.
There are a number of popular battle royale video games, films, and visual novels. Along with the Battle Royale franchise itself, other examples of battle royale films include The Big Brawl (1980), Mean Guns (1997), The Hunger Games franchise (2008), The Purge (2013), Assassination Nation (2018), and The Hunt (2020). In-universe battle royale video games were depicted in Btooom!, and in the Phantom Bullet (Gun Gale Online) arc of the light novel series Sword Art Online (2010 in print) as the "Bullet of Bullets" tournament.
See also
- Gladiators
- King of the Hill (game)
- Melee