Ring Out

...and she's not getting back up again.^note It was a single-round match, after all.

To win a match held in a bounded area by throwing, forcing, or tricking the enemy into stepping out of bounds, thus disqualifying them on a technicality.

Occasionally justified by the rules of the sport — but only a few Real Life sports use it. Another justification is to make the edge of the ring be a Bottomless Pit. The Ring-Out Boss is a subtrope of this where a boss in a videogame has to be defeated by a Ring Out. May or may not cause a Disney Villain Death.

See also Edge Gravity.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball:
  • This was a valid way of winning in each Tournament Arc... until the Cell Games, when Cell decides to nuke the ring from orbit so they can keep fighting since Goku's made it so much fun to play.
  • You have to touch anything outside the ring to be disqualified. Goku got away with using the Flying Nimbus to save himself once (since the judges were unclear on whether clouds counted as "outside the ring"), but was told he can't use it anymore after that; instead, he learns to fly by spinning his tail like a helicopter and then more traditionally later on.
  • The "anything outside the ring" rule is critical in the second tournament arc, where the main opponent, Tenshinhan, initially is able to flout the rule by being able to fly. Goku eventually manages to knock him out of the sky, though he falls as well. With their starting trajectories, Tenshinhan hits the ground first... except Goku happens to smash into the side of a car a split second beforehand. Thus, according to the rules, Goku loses by pure dumb luck.
  • This rule was later brought up in the Buu Saga, but it wasn't necessarily a good thing as it allowed one of the villains to perform an outright horrific No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by preventing his opponent (Gohan's girlfriend Videl) from touching the ground outside the arena.
  • In Dragon Ball Super, the tournament between Universes 6 and 7 uses the Budokai's rules (as per Goku's suggestion), meaning the ring out rule is in effect here too. It ends up happening a lot, most importantly during Goku's fight with Hit, where Goku rings himself out to protest Beerus and Champa's behavior. Hit returns the favor by throwing the fight (badly) against Monaka, which means Universe 7 wins the tournament. Other fights play with this concept, like Botamo, who can only be beaten by a ring-out, and Vegeta's fight with Magetta, where the ring explodes and Vegeta only remains in the match because he landed on one of the broken pieces of the ring itself.
  • The Tournament of Power has this as its main rule — aside from disqualifications, ring-outs are the only way to win, and whichever team has the most members remaining at the end of the time limit wins. And unlike the other tournaments in the franchise, ki-based flight is explicitly against the rules (natural flight is allowed, which leads to some teams specifically recruiting Bird People or Insectoid Aliens). It's also the way the Universe 7 team manages to ultimately beat Jiren and win.
• Subverted in Eyeshield 21. With only a few seconds left on the clock and with the Devilbats behind, they have to force themselves out of the field in order to stop the clock. In one special case, Monta used his catching skills to grab the out of bounds and stop the clock.
  • The above spoiler is a valid tactic in American football in order to stop the clock.
• In Futaba-kun Change!, this was a rule for the ridiculous tournament held to determine which club the female Futaba would join. Male Futaba accidentally wins one match by knocking a little guy from the Gardening Club out of the ring while fighting a giant carnivorous plant, that guy being his actual opponent.
• Kengan Ashura: This is the primary difference between the Purgatory and Kengan matches in Omega. While in the latter, winners are determined by the last man standing, Purgatory fights take place in a ring, and whoever falls out of the ring loses. This is exploited when the two groups fight each other under Purgatory rules. For example, Carlos, realizing that he can't beat Kaolan in a straight match, manages to lure the latter manages to lure him to the edge of the arena and drag him to the ground, causing the Kengan Association to lose their first round.
• During the Tournament Arc of Kill la Kill, Gamagoori informs Ryuko that falling out of the arena is grounds for disqualification, after deliberately knocking her off once. She only stayed on by catching the edge of the arena with her sword. Later, Jakuzure bombards Ryuko from above since you have to be below the level of the arena to be considered out.
• A ring out is one of the ways for a victory during the finals tournament of the U.A. Sports Festival arc in My Hero Academia. Shinso's entire tactic is to use his Brainwashing Quirk to make his opponent turn around and walk out of bounds, thus winning without even throwing a punch; it would have worked had he not been fighting Deku. Momo also notably loses this way, having been so busy evading Tokoyami's attacks that she stepped out of bounds without realising.
• In the Dressrosa arc of One Piece, this is one of the rules in the Corrida Colosseum tournaments. The young gladiator Rebecca uses that to her advantage, using her speed and Observation Haki to throw her opponents outside the ring. It is noted that she has never injured opponents directly because she always does this.
• This is how Mori beats Honey during their clash during one of the final chapters of Ouran High School Host Club.
• The Martial Arts Gymnastics tournament in Ranma ½. Notable in that the ring can move on command. Once the people under the ring were forced to run for it, taking the ring with them, the fight continued on the ringposts. It ended with Ranma breaking Kodachi's post, dropping her to the floor while she desperately clung to the broken halves.
  • This is also implied in the Joketsuzoku ("Chinese Amazon") tournament that Ranma interrupted while in China. Getting kicked off the dueling log cost Shampoo the championship, even though she wasn't knocked unconscious.
    • The "woman" she beat just before Ranma ate the prize lost pretty much the same way.
• During the two episodes Tournament Arc in Sonic X this was used on a couple of matches, most infamously this is how Rouge defeated Tails after stunning him with a peck on the cheek.
• Being a manga on wrestling, this happens in Tiger Mask from time to time, the most notable instances being:
  • In the Maskmen World Championship the fight between Tiger Mask and Gold Mask ends in a draw because they both get out of the ring, and while Tiger Mask knocks out his opponent he fails to climb back in time. Later in the final match, Tiger Mask and Great Zebra risk losing at one point due being both out of the ring while Mr. X was counting on them.
  • During the fight with Black V for the Maskmen World Championship Tiger Mask defeats his opponent by ring-out, neutralizing his immunity to submission moves by slamming him on the concrete of the floor (the mattresses having been eliminated on Tiger Mask's request) while keeping the head pressed on his opponent's back.
  • Tiger Mask's third finishing move, the Tiger V, ends with the opponent knocked out and thrown out of the ring for added humiliation, with them losing by ring out unless Tiger Mask drags them back on the ring.
• The Tournament Arc of YuYu Hakusho has a "destroy the ring so you have to fight to the death" moment similar to the DBZ example.
  • Though in the Dark Tournament, you have to be outside the ring for ten seconds (or more accurately, ten counts) to be considered out, just as you have to stay down for ten seconds to be out. Most fights end with somebody dead or unconscious anyway because otherwise they can just climb back into the ring. The exception being Kuwabara whose opponent tied him up so he couldn't reach the ring, and was later tricked into being warped out of the stadium... twice.

Fan Works

• Victories by ring-out are a common feature of Ashes of the Past, though battles between Flying Pokémon tend to have much more relaxed boundaries. Possibly the most dramatic example is Pikachu turning a pair of tree branches into a makeshift railgun and firing Registeel into a distant mountain.
• In Boldores And Boomsticks, Yang loses her championship match against Lucario when she misses with a punch and realizes too late that she's going Too Fast to Stop, flying past him and over the boundary line.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: This is how Ami finally defeats the Horned Reaper, staggering him with a hit that makes him step back into a Bottomless Pit, though it takes an epic battle to reach the point where it's possible.

Films — Live-Action

• Subverted in Black Panther (2018), where the ritual combat for the Wakandan throne takes place between a waterfall and a semicircle of warriors with spears. The fight ends with yield or death, so when Killmonger throws King T'Challa off the waterfall and he shows up alive the next day to finish the fight, the Dora Milaje royal guards promptly turn against Killmonger because he hasn't technically won the throne.
• In Bloodsport and its sequels, knocking or forcing your opponent off the raised fighting platform is an Instant-Win Condition.
• In Ip Man, the final fight against General Miura is held on a raised platform with falling off it as a defeat condition. In the sequel, Ip has to take challenges from the other Hong Kong-based masters on a table, with getting off the table as one of the defeat conditions.
• In The Karate Kid (1984) going out of bounds temporarily stops the fight and results in a warning.

Literature

• In Guardians of the Flame, warrior Karl realizes he's out of his depth during the Arena games, and has to find some unorthodox tactics to secure his victory. One of them is making use of the previously largely ignored Ring Out rule.

Live Action TV

• American Gladiators had this as half of the two-part 'Breakthrough and Conquer' event. The 'Conquer' half required the player to force any part of the Gladiator's body out of a round wrestling-style ring within the allotted 10 or 15 seconds. This was probably toughest and often funniest when the female contenders were trying to do it to six-foot tall Sky.
• Gladiators (2024):
  • The "Duel" challenge puts a contender on a small podium, raised several feet above the mat, armed with a pugil stick. A Gladiator with a pugil stick stands on an adjacent podium. They try to knock each other off the podiums before time runs out. If someone falls, or steps on the other podium, they've lost.
  • "The Edge" is a one-on-one challenge that pits a contestant against a Gladiator on a framework of narrow beams 30 feet above a net. Points are scored by repeatedly crossing from one side to the other and back before time runs out, but if a contender falls off, it's all over. If a Gladiator falls, the contender doesn't automatically win - they still need to cross to score their points.
  • "Collision" has a variation - any contestant the Gladiators can knock off the bridge has lost. This time it doesn't work both ways, as the Gladiators themselves aren't on the bridge.
• On Robot Wars a battle was originally supposed to either be decided by which robot stopped moving first or, if they both went the distance, on points. Then came Chaos 2 vs Firestorm in the 3rd series and the rules of UK robot combat changed forever...
  • Even on Robot Combat shows where they fight in a confined box with no "wall" to be thrown over like Battlebots or King of Bots there are sections of the arena where a robot can be thrown from where they cannot make it back onto the floor area (often in a small walled-off area in the corners where the door is), effectively ringing them out and bringing the battle to an immediate end. In the match between Poison Arrow and Bombshell in Battlebots ABC Season 2, Poison Arrow was defeated when Bombshell's spinner punted it into the air and caused it to fall down into the space behind the screws like a slice of toast in a toaster.

Professional Wrestling

• The ring out is a standard part of the professional wrestling ruleset. Particularly inverted in WCW, which had an odd rule in play where throwing your opponent over the top rope constituted a disqualification loss. This was not very popular, although it had some uses for story scenarios. This descends from the NWA's rulebook (see below).
• The Battle Royal, where you must toss your opponents out of the ring (over the top rope only) to win. And there are a lot of variations on it (WWE's Royal Rumble, where the entrants enter in sequence, is probably the most well known). In normal matches, on the other hand, a wrestler who's out of the ring for a 10 count (20 in Japan), regardless of whether he went over the top rope, is counted out and loses.
• Inverted with steel cage matches, as one of the ways to win such a match is to escape the cage. Sometimes, escaping through the entrance gate is an option, but it's generally considered much cooler when the gate is padlocked after the wrestlers enter and the only way to escape is to climb the cage. There have been several instances throughout the history of the sport where one wrestler, typically a Wrestling Monster, threw his opponent through the wall of the cage, giving that wrestler the victory. (This is generally done to keep the monster looking strong while his opponent gains the victory.)^note This is also how Vince Russo became WCW world champ, Goldberg threw him right through the cage and to the floor
• Also inverted in the sense that getting yourself to touch the ropes (however slightly) is a common way to counter a submission hold (the opponent has a 5 count to let go or be disqualified). Pin counts are also stopped if any part of you is touching or under the ropes.
• Averted in falls count anywhere matches, where pinfalls and submissions outside the ring still count.
• The National Wrestling Alliance has a case where causing a ring out results in a victory for the one tossed, as throwing the opponent over the top rope is grounds for disqualification. Fans at a Ring of Honor show actually chanted "Dusty Finish" when Nigel McGuinness failed to win the World Heavyweight Title from Adam Pearce due to Pearce being knocked over the top.
• Largely ignoring this trope was/is the trademark of FMW and its various imitators. Enforcing this ruling was one of the main motivations of Drew Gulak's campaign for a better CZW, and even after that lost steam, Cherry Bomb invoked it to try and cut a mandatory WSU Title defense of hers short, only it was almost immediately revoked by Sami Callihan, determined to make sure such a thing never took hold in the company.

Tabletop Games

• In BattleTech, a unit that skids or is forced off the map cannot normally return and is considered destroyed or in retreat (usually depending on which edge it was forced off) for victory purposes. This can happen purely by accident or as a result of enemy action — for instance, a BattleMech at the edge of the map can potentially be simply pushed off by another. Likewise, units forced into prohibited terrain (i.e., of a type that they could not normally enter of their own volition) may find themselves simply destroyed outright as a result.
• Star Wars: Legion has any unit that leaves the board be instantly defeated. This is usually either because they panic off the table, or because they fall victim to an attack that allows their opponent to move them.
• On a similar note, both Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 prohibit units from leaving the battlefield normally, but if they do, they're counted as losses. The usual reason for this is a failed Morale check, or worse, a Tank Shock. (Unlike most scenarios that result in a Morale check, a tank is perfectly capable of following the fleeing unit across the map to keep "pushing" them and preventing them from regrouping — memorably indicated in one Turn Signals on a Land Raider strip as the tank physically pushing the hapless infantry off the table.) Fliers are the one exception, able to freely return from the game after leaving; since they have a minimum speed they have to move each round, and a maximum amount they can turn, they sometimes can't avoid leaving.

Video Games

• The Japanese Mega Drive game Aah Harimanda is all about sumo wrestling, and, well, the goal is to get the opponent out of the ring.
• In Armored Core and its Spiritual Successor, Daemon X Machina, each mission has a boundary area which, if you cross it, automatically forfeits the mission. Fortunately, there's usually a smaller boundary which will pop up a bunch of warnings that you're too close to the edge before you go fully out of bounds. In Daemon, the boundary can be particularly annoying because some of the larger bosses (like the Gunfort) can send you reeling out of bounds in one hit if you were already close to the edge to begin with. Naturally, enemies can ignore the mission boundary all they want.
• Battle Arena Toshinden (with the additional Good Bad Bug of the victor being able to fall out of the ring themselves during their Victory Pose). In fact, beating the game on a two-day rental was a fairly mean feat if you once figured out the knack for performing the Ring Out trick even up to and on the final boss.
  • Its port for the Game Boy, considering that it was on a 2D instead of a 3D plane, handled the concept rather uniquely: both fighters can get knocked into either side of the arena up to three times, as indicated by how many arrows are remaining near their portrait. If they take a fourth hit at the very edge...
• In the Bloody Roar series, you can choose to have walls around the arena or not; and if you have walls turned on, you can choose whether they're breakable or not. In either case, if you leave the ring, it's an automatic victory for the other player. In the first game, the final boss's arena has unbreakable walls (and solid metal walls drop down partway through her first health bar), meaning you can't cheese your way to a victory against her.
• In Breath of Fire IV, one minigame has Nina square off against a sailor at the mast of a ship, trying to push the other off under a time limit. The sailor is sturdier and must be pushed from behind (and only after being stunned by a Goomba Stomp), but he just needs to fall once. By contrast, whenever Nina is thrown off, she just uses her wings to float back up to resume the battle, although falling deducts the game score.
• One stage in Brutal: Paws of Fury is a bridge from which you can knock your enemies off.
• In the arena fights with the handmaidens and Mandalorians in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords where you are allowed to use the Force, using one of the Force Push line of powers to knock the opponents out of the ring automatically disqualifies them.
• This only results in both fighters being returned to the center in SNK's Buriki One.
• In Caveman Ugh-Lympics, you can defeat your opponent in the Clubbing event one of two ways: beating them senseless, or pushing them toward the cliff edge. Hitting the opponent with repeated low strikes causes them to grab their foot and hop backwards a few steps. If they get pushed all the way back, the cliff edge breaks off, and they fall down.
• Dark Messiah has a kick attack that can send enemies flying a good distance. The game's environments are built in such a way that this move can be more devastating than the best spells or weapons, to the point where 1UP.com dubbed it "The Adventures of Sir Kicksalot Deathboot in the Land of the Conspicuously Placed Spike Racks".
• While the rest of the Dead or Alive series would avert this with its famous free-form arenas, this trope was played straight in the original game (part of what contributes to its Early-Installment Weirdness). The outer rim of the ring was an explosive field that would blow up fighters that were knocked down onto it, but if you could push your opponent beyond this boundary, you would score a Ring Out victory. This also only applied to the original arcade version and the Saturn port. The PlayStation port did away with this and simply extended the "Danger Zone" infinitely from the neutral center.
• In Def Jam: Fight For New York, there are a couple stages with ring out potential. But you have to smash the ring barriers with the opponent's face a few times in order to get them through. Then there's the Subway stage, where a Ring Out is only an instant win if a train is coming.
• In Dodge, enemies are destroyed if they get forced out of the screen boundaries by the wall-like patterns that move across the screen.
• Dragon Ball Z video games will sometimes use this on the World Tournament Arena stage. The Dragon Ball Z: Budokai games represented it as an Invisible Wall around the ring, and being knocked into it was an instant defeat even if the fighter was in mid-air at the time. The Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi games were more forgiving and anime-accurate, letting players fight outside the ring as long as they didn't touch any solid surface except the arena floor. Finally, some games like Dragon Ball Xenoverse do away with the concept entirely, presumably with the Hand Wave that their Ki Manipulation skills let them avoid touching out-of-bounds areas.
• Each stage of Real Bout Fatal Fury (except Geese Tower) had destroyable boundaries at the edges. Getting knocked out (or falling out on your own) rewarded your opponent with a special animation as well as the win for the round. Notably, in the subway stage, the boundary consists of spectators; the third fight takes place after the subway is closed for the night, so there aren't any, making it the one stage in the game where you can instantly ring the opponent out.
• Discouraged in Fighters Destiny, where under standard rules, a ring-out is the lowest-scoring way to end a round, at only one point (out of the seven needed to win the match); a conventional knockout is worth three.
• Fighting Vipers played with it, as all of its stages were walled off, but a sufficiently strong blow would send the opponent right through the wall and out. However, said blow would also knock out the opponent before they crashed into the wall, meaning that the ring-out isn't really what makes them lose the fight.
• Anyone knocked out of the arena in Fights in Tight Spaces is out of the fight, and the appropriate spaces are often marked with skulls just as a reminder; it offers a convenient way of dealing with counter-focused opponents and minibosses. It makes a lot of sense with some maps: throwing someone off a prison walkway is obviously going to make it hard to participate in the rest of the fight, and there's nothing saying the prison transport isn't in-motion during the fight (which would make being thrown out probably fatal). It makes a bit less sense when you shove someone out of the door of a public restroom or tattoo parlor and they immediately pass out rather than just turning around and coming back in again. Some levels will even reward you for throwing two enemies out of the arena.
• Several boss battles in Final Fantasy XIV take place in arenas where falling off the edge is a One-Hit Kill on you with no way for your healers to revive you (until Stormblood), with Titan being the first and most memorable of these. The battle against Ultros and Typhon has a non lethal version where getting blown out of the ring immobilizes you for a few moments before you're allowed to jump back into the fight and if the entire party is shoved out of the ring, it counts as a loss.
• In God of War, Kratos can ring out some of his enemies by physically dragging or throwing them across the invisible line that marks their A.I. boundary, while he himself has no such artificial boundaries and is protected against normal pits by Edge Gravity (even when Blown Across the Room).
• Jump Super Stars lets you get a KO by knocking someone out of the "panels" (after bashing your way through the side of the page).
• Killer Instinct usually lacks ring outs, with the traditional "out of arena" death animations being more akin to Mortal Kombat's stage fatalities in that they can only be done to an opponent on 0 life. The secret Sky Stage, however, lets either of the two fighters accidentally fall off of the stage if they misstep even slightly off of the edge or mistime a jump.
• One fight in King's Quest: Mask of Eternity can only be won by knocking your opponent off of the tower you're fighting on.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has a sumo minigame in which you have to push your Goron opponent out of bounds to win.
  • Oracle of Seasons has something similar in a boxing match.
• Magicka. A lot of the spells have more than a little kick to them.
• One of the stadia in Carmageddon is a giant tower and you can ram your opponents over the edge. Technically this doesn't result in an automatic write off, as it is just possible to have your car sufficiently powered up to survive the resulting damage, but it is almost impossible to return from without restarting.
• Mass Effect had open areas where this was a viable strategy. A combination of a Lift and Throw biotic combo at high levels could easily throw an enemy out of the playable area for an instant-kill. The later Mass Effect games also used this to an extent, though limits on leveling your abilities made it harder.
• In Bomberman 64, pretty much any boss the same size as Bomberman can be defeated this way, by first stunning them with a bomb kick and then picking them up like a bomb and tossing them off the edge of the stage for an instant kill. Amusingly, at least one of the bosses (Orion) is aware of this strategy and will do it to you if you let him stun you with his green energy wave.
• Mario Party series:
  • Mario Party and Mario Party 2 have Bumper Balls, a mini-game that can only be won by forcing opponents off the circular playing field, eliminating them.
  • Mario Party 4 has the sumo-based "Bowser Wrestling" mini-game, in which winning is accomplished by shoving the other character out of the ring.
  • Mario Party 8:
    • The minigame Glacial Meltdown has all characters fight against each other in an iceberg in the midst of an arctic lake. The objective for each character is to kick out all the others, and melee attacks are used for this purpose. The last player standing wins, though more than one player can win if they survive for five minutes. If all players end up falling down, the last one to touch the water will be the winner (as a result, no tie is possible in this minigame).
    • The minigame King of the Thrill has two teams of characters placed in rocky pillars right under a bigger one. In one lower pillar, one player from a team is facing someone from the other, while on the other pillar the other two characters face each other. When the minigame begins, the two paired characters fight until one in each side is thrown away, and as time passes the pillars will gradually crumble piece by piece to make someone falling more likely. If both players from a team win, they'll climb nearby ladders to reach the bigger pillar and celebrate their victory. If the two players who win are from opposite teams, then they'll duke it out in the bigger pillar until someone falls down (and that pillar will gradually begin to crumble as well); the winner will also share victory with their fallen buddy. In the event both/all players fall down at the same time, the minigame ends in a tie.
  • Mario Party 9:
    • Magma Mayhem places the players atop a platform hanging from a chain above a sea of lava. The objective is to be the last player standing by attacking the other players to push them off the edge. Complicating matters is the fact that the players can weigh down sides of the platform depending on where they are standing.
    • Bomb Barge places the players on a raft floating down a poisonous river with Bob-ombs raining onto it. Any players that fall off the raft are eliminated, and they can kick the Bob-ombs into their opponents to this end.
  • Mario Party 10:
    • Cliffside Crisis places players on the side of a cliff, standing atop some Bomps protruding out from the sides. Players must do their best to avoid falling, either by ensuring that the Bomps don't retract into the cliffside beneath their feet, or push them off the edge.
    • Bouncy Brawl takes place on a giant trampoline floating in the sky. Players have to push their rivals off the edge to make them fall. They can use a spin attack to increase the power of which they can push their opponents, but if they spin too much, they will become dizzy, leaving them wide open for their opponents to attack them.
    • Platform Push places the players on a small island in the middle of a poison river. They can punch and kick their rivals to try and push them into the poison. As the minigame goes on, the platforms making up the island gradually sink into the poison, giving players less room to work with.
  • Mario Party: Star Rush:
    • In Roller Revenge, the players must avoid falling from a platform atop a large structure. Players can try to push their opponents off the edge. Complicating this are four Spikes that throw Spike Bars that roll across the platform that cause anyone who touches them to get sent flying. While this minigame gives each player three "lives", once time expires, ties will be broken by whoever has the most.
    • Bowser's Power Bomb places players atop a platform floating in the sky, and challenges them to stay atop it without falling off. They can punch their opponents to try and push them off, but the real trouble comes from Bowser, who throws Bob-ombs onto the platform that explode and cause it to violently rock in different directions. Any players that fail to last through the 30-second timer will lose, and if the minigame shows up during a Coinathlon, they will lose some of their progress on the track.
  • Super Mario Party: The minigame Soak or Croak has the four players run around an arena located inside a water fountain. Each player is equipped with a water gun that they can fire at their opponents to push them away, but it can only hold a limited amount of water, and must be reloaded by shaking the Joy-Con. Any players that get pushed out of the fountain are eliminated, and the last player standing wins.
• Mortal Kombat: Deception and Mortal Kombat: Armageddon both feature Ring Outs. Some simply move the fight to a different part of the stage (these are marked in yellow), but Death Traps, marked with red, would kill the opponent instantly. They'd be back for another round if the match isn't over, of course.
• The main objective in each stage of Motos is to make all the enemies fall off the stage by bumping into them and pushing them off the edge. All the while, you have to avoid getting pushed off yourself.
• Overwatch: Most maps feature a Bottomless Pit here or there, making ring-out eliminations possible. A number of attacks do Knock Back, which makes these attacks very useful for getting ring-out eliminations. Other abilities can also be creatively used to get a ring-out, such as using Roadhog's Hook to pull an opponent over a pit and then release them or firing Orisa's Halt over a pit to pull opponents toward it and over the edge. Several heroes have abilities that can prevent a ring-out if used correctly.
• In the Last Stand game mode of Party Animals, one means of defeating opponents is to force them off the arena. On the submarine, players who fall off can swim to a degree and climb back up onto the sub.
• While you can toss objects and enemies out of bounds in Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom, doing so to enemies just increases the remaining enemy levels by the same amount of the monster that was tossed. Any of your allies that get the same treatment, however, are just gone from the field for the remainder of the battle.
• Prince of Persia (2008) has this. It's how 90% of the mooks are likely to die, given how block-happy they are, and a good way to kill The Hunter. Beating The Warrior tends to require you do this, as well.
• This is how King Hippo is KOed in Punch-Out!! Wii. He has so much health that the player only has to KO him once, at which point he falls out of the ring on his own. This is actually in keeping with the real rules for boxing. (King Hippo also only needs to be knocked down once in the NES version, but there he simply falls onto the ropes and doesn't get up before the ten-count.)
• Ring out is possible in most, but not all stages of Samurai Shodown 64. Can be averted if the fighter is hanging on the edge, at which point they can hold Up and press their buttons to jump back in.
• In Save the Light, sometimes battle is initiated with ledges on the sides of the arena, and several attacks cause knockback. Player characters pushed off these ledges take some damage and sometimes get a status ailment (burn if they fall in lava, cold if they fall in ice water) before teleporting back up to where they started. Enemies die instantly, even if they aren't falling into a pit, which is why a lot of tougher enemies can't be knocked back, but Smoky Quartz's main attack can easily blow them away with gusty winds.
• In Soulcalibur III's Chronicles of the Sword mode, ring outs inflict half the victim's max HP worth of damage. Also, True Final Boss Night Terror is completely immune and will just fly back into the ring. V implemented stage transitions akin to Tekken, wherein getting a ring out victory in one round can cause the match to transition to a new area.
• Capcom's Star Gladiator has this — and the PlayStation version has an option to turn it off!
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario World: The bosses of Castles 1 and 7 can only be defeated by knocking them off the platform into the surrounding Lava Pit.
  • Super Mario 64:
    • Bullies and Big Bullies can only be defeated in the same way.
    • Inverted with Big Bob-omb. Throwing him off his mountain will restart the battle from the beginning.
• The Super Smash Bros. series is all about this trope. The means of defeating the opponent most of the time is to force him or her off the stage (with damage not being a hard indicator of how close a fighter is to defeat, but rather a variable in the knockback formula which determines how far a fighter is launched by any given attack), which usually has open boundaries as well as native hazards. Additionally, they can be knocked into the sky and turned into a star (or into the screen).
• The Tekken franchise typically doesn't do ring outs, featuring endless arenas or ones with explicit walls, but the fight with NANCY-MI847J in Tekken 6 has a destructable floor which is an instant KO for you if you ever fall through.
• The rooftop levels in most Twisted Metal games.
• Virtua Fighter:
  • Beginning with Virtua Fighter 4, several stages have had walls that you can smash your opponent through (or you can vault your opponent over it). In the first few installments, before Edge Gravity, it was very easy to ring yourself out by mistake (Virtua Fighter 3 was the first with partially walled arenas, but hose walls were not breakable).
  • In Virtua Fighter 5, there are also different wall heights. Some walls go up to the ceiling so there's no way to get a Ring Out next to those (unless it's destructible). Some walls come up to the characters' waists, which makes it possible to Ring Out, but you need to hit a decent Launcher Move to throw your opponent over those edges. Then some walls only come up to the characters' ankles. These walls function similar to Soulcalibur in that you can't ring yourself out just by walking to the edge, but being floated out of the ring is relatively trivial. Also similar to Soulcalibur are the inclusion of partially-walled stages where Ring Outs are only possible on some sides of the ring. There are also two stages (the gym stage and the snowy wilderness stage) where the edges will be blocked or exposed depending on what round the fight is in.
• Yakuza has this for one of the underground tournaments. Like in Def Jam above, you need to break the walls with either your weapon or your opponent's body first.

Western Animation

• In The Legend of Korra, this is an important mechanic of pro-bending. Forcing an opposing player off the back (and only the back) of the arena and into the surrounding pool removes them from the game for the remainder of the round. Forcing all three opposing players off the back in a single round is an Instant-Win Condition, which is why, in a best of three rounds format, the third round is always played. It's the only way left to win for a team down two rounds.

Real Life

• Sumo has a number of kimarite (winning techniques) and a couple hiwaza (non-techniques) centered on ring outs, with yorikiri (frontal force-out) being the most commonly used technique in the entire sport.
• In Wrestling (Greco-Roman and freestyle), causing an opponent to go out of bounds scores you one point.
• In Robot Wars, the arena had two walls: a fully enclosed one to protect the audience from shrapnel, and an inner wall a couple feet high which protected the outer wall from being directly hit by robots' weapons. A gap of several feet separated them, allowing the installation of tracks for remotely operated cameras inside the arena which couldn't have their view blocked by the steel framework supporting the lexan wall panels. This also had the unintended consequence that a sufficiently powerful flipper robot could throw an opponent over the inner wall and defeat it. In later series, most robots could run upside-down or self-right, and were durable enough to not suffer much internal damage from being flipped, rendering the original purpose of flippers almost useless, so flippers ended up relying on Ring Outs to win. After the televised series ended, spinners were banned in the heavyweight class due to the touring events not having the budget for arenas that could withstand them, so flippers became extremely dominant. Note that in robotic combat, a Ring Out is usually referred to as an OOTA (Out Of The Arena).
  • You can also win this way in most video games based on robotic combat, including adaptations of Robot Wars as well as titles like Robot Arena 2 that aren't based on any particular event.
  • YMMV for other events, especially outside of Europe. Some events, like BattleBots in its original televised run, have no real gap between the inner and outer walls, with the lower portion of the walls simply being a more durable but non-transparent material, making a Ring Out impossible. In other events, like Robogames, the gap between inner and outer walls is narrow enough that while robots in the smaller weight classes can easily be thrown out, larger ones may only fit at a certain angle or not at all, and can slide back into the arena. In others, like the reboot of BattleBots and many events in small weight classes, a Ring Out is only possible in certain, relatively small areas. This has been executed at least once, with Wrecks's gigantic saw sending Witch Doctor flying into the air and landing in one of said small areas.
  • In a few "Sumo-style" events like Robot Battles, the arena is a raised platform which robots can be pushed off of, making Ring Outs THE primary winning method. It also helps that due to the lack of a lexan wall most of the really damaging weapons are banned.
• Gymnastics floor routines deduct points for stepping out of the ring.
• In Kendo forcing an opponent of bounds results a foul, which can be a round or match winning point. However, "unfair shoving or pushing" of an opponent out gets the pusher a foul. You're going to have to do it with footwork and clever offense.
  • The same is true in Western-style fencing.
• In judo, if a contestant is outside the mat for a certain period of time, the match is stopped and restarted with both contestants standing at the center of the mat. Squirming your way off the mat is a perfectly viable tactic for breaking a hold.
• This is usually how fights between male beetles are decided, both in the wild and in the staged beetle fights that are a popular gambling activity in Japan and parts of continental Asia. The beetles generally wrestle on top of a log or branch until one of them is knocked off.
• In boxing, knocking your opponent out of the ring is a legal technique to win. If they get knocked out of the ring, they have twenty seconds to get back in, unassisted. If they don’t, you win by knock out. Famously, the fight between Oleg Maskaev and Hasim Rahman ended with Maskaev knocking Rahman between the ropes and out of the ring near the announcers.

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