Deadly Games in Video Games.
- After Dark (Berkeley Systems) has a trivia game, You Bet Your Head!, where contestants have to answer trivia questions to dodge the hammer. This is one of the few "interactive" screensavers where the player can join in.
- Banjo-Kazooie: The last level, Grunty's Furnace Fun, has a lethal board game motif. The sequel, Banjo-Tooie, had a quiz show motif with Gruntilda and her sisters playing against the heroes; the losers got a weight dropped on them.
- In Blast Chamber for the PlayStation, the 'players' have bombs strapped to their chests. The objective is to run down the clock on the others' bombs before they do the same to you.
- Also present in Spiritual Successor Bloody Good Time, with the Director having actors "compete" for the lead role.
- Buckshot Roulette: It is Russian Roulette after all, where there's the possibility of a player shooting their head off and dying as a result, but it is possible that your character could simply decide to leave upon being resuscitated after losing the first two rounds. All bets are off on the final round though, which can only end with one of you dying.
- In one episode of The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark, a missing persons case leads to an otherworldly game show where the abductees are forced to run a gauntlet and try to avoid getting eaten by a variety of giant monsters.
- In Destiny, the Crucible is one of these, pitting the Guardians against one another in brutal, endless battles to the death to train them to better fight the enemies of mankind. However, since Guardians can casually resurrect themselves with their Ghosts, these battles to the death are more of a popular Blood Sport which are televised across the system. They also serve as a way to defend strategic locations, as Guardians can't really be relied on to do silly things like standing guard, so the Crucible ensures that armed and ready Guardians will always be there to defend the location.
- Fire Emblem Fates has a DLC series that can be seen as a version of this. The Heirs of Fates stages are based in alternate universes where the Greater Scope Villain Anankos has destroyed several worlds following one or another possible story path (some are based after Conquest, others after Birthright), plus at least one Revelation world. Each world has a Second Generation child as its Sole Survivor, and Anankos dumps them all in the Revelation world to pit them against each other. All for his amusement. Fortunately the Revelation world's Shigure manages to keep his wit despite all the crap he's been through and, with a bit of help from Azura's soul, does his best to set himself up as the Big Good and reunite the remaining kids so they can turn the game on its head and fight back...
- In Flashback there's Death Tower, prize for which is a trip to Earth. Forms one of the levels the hero Conrad must pass through on his mission.
- Present as a gag (in the form of a radio commercial) in Grand Theft Auto III:
"Tonight...the TV event that will make history...Liberty City Survivor! This takes reality TV to a whole new level! We'll take 20 recently paroled guys, equip them with grenade launchers and flamethrowers...and let them hunt each other down!! It's the reality show where you...just might be...part of the action!!"
- In RPG Maker horror game GU-L, Nagata announces his intention to make the students assist him with an “experiment” by turning the situation into a death game with him as the final boss. Either the horrors of his mansion kill all of the students, or the students kill him for the escape key.
- Idol Death Game TV has the In-Universe 10th Anniversary Milestone Celebration Game Show within a Video Game for Dream of Dream, Dream or Death, where idols participate against one another in an idol competition (in a game promising Multiple Endings depending on the idol you're playing as, and which idol dies), hosted by a pink psycho tapir named Doripaku. The last place contestant in each round has to participate in a 'Death Concert', a Danganronpa-esque execution where the idol will 'shine for the last time in her life' (read: perform their song while the DanganRonpa-esque execution occurs). Some deaths include having a muscular Doripaku throw a baseball through your chest, getting boiled and somehow surviving... then getting electrocuted, and getting mauled by a bear.
- And for a Game within a Show within a Game example, we have Dream Russian Roulette, where Death Concert victim Rito Karasuma plays an Unwinnable by Design variant of... well, Russian Roulette, with 5 Doripaku-esque tapirs where all the sandwiches are poisoned. It ends with the tapirs and Rito dead, the latter eating the poisoned sandwich.
- Averted in the D.o.D Chapter, where everybody, except Chiharu, the only playable character for this mode (and yes, that includes anybody who was mauled, blown up, incinerated etc during the course of the game), comes back to life to call out Doripaku, who goes mad and accidentally runs off the roof off the building and dies, leaving the contestants to form their own pop group, 'Perfect Live'.
- Hidden City: The premise of "Playing to Live" is about Violet inviting Mr. Black to play board games with her while discussing a truce. The board game turns out to be rigged, and it traps Mr. Black and Rayden inside, forcing them to fight their way through numerous dangerous creatures that Violet sent to attack them. It's pretty much stated that without Kira, Carlos and the player character helping them from outside, the two would have died for real.
- Hiveswap: While in the purple car, to make it to the engine room, Marvus forces Joey to play a game where she has to kill random trolls on the train based on the chosen blood caste. It goes Gold, Teal, and then Purple. She manages to avoid killing the first two trolls Marvus rolls. But when she needs to kill a Purpleblood, Baizli tries to kill her first, only for Xefros to push Baizli off the train and onto the spikes below. It counts and Marvus lets them pass.
- In I=MGCM Chapter 13 onwards, Omnis (except his heroines) gets trapped into a battle royal-esque game in the hellish Dark World where the magical heroines' alternate selves in that universe kill each other individually, and only one surviving magical girl will get her wish. Even worse, lots of demons, including the heroines' demonized alternate selves, appear in that universe, and kill a number of them. Fortunately, that universe and the heroines are not from the main universe and our "Prime" version heroines are just fine, but still...
- In Jets'n'Guns, there is a level in which the player has to fight through a level full of enemies to entertain the viewers of Carnage TV. There is a scene in which the announcer says that 100 viewers had won the special opportunity to be slain by the hero; when the player ship meets them, they even cheer and wave signs reading "Kill me".
- The Killing Game Show, whose premise is All There in the Manual for those who know it as Fatal Rewind.
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: Smog frames its boss battle, which takes the form of a complex puzzle where Link must reassemble Smog's dispersed form while its parts spit fireballs at him, as a game that Link is forced to play, with the price of losing being his life.
"It's time for our little game! I break apart. If you can force me back together and blow me away, it ends! But before you do, I shall take a bit of your soul! Now begin!"
- MadWorld: The premise of the game centers around an ultraviolent deathmatch game show.
- Manhunt: The original game is a snuff-reality show combination that thrusts a prison convict into a city full of murderous thugs whom he must execute to escape alive. The ending brings it full circle, with the protagonist inflicting a gruesome fate upon the director who put him through hell on Earth.
- In Metal Gear Ac!d, Teliko was kidnapped by The Dragon La Clown and locked up in a giant board game room at the top of a tower. When Snake stumbles across her, he is trapped there as well, and they battle to the death for the right to leave, using special abilities given to them by certain squares on the board game.
- Penarium has a variation on this: the player is forced to perform for a Repulsive Ringmaster who thinks nothing of complicating the tasks he assigns with a wide variety of deadly traps.
- The entirety of Ratchet: Deadlocked is a deadly gladiatorial game.
- Saints Row: The Third has Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax, where you run through various deathtraps shooting guys in mascot costumes and various targets for bonuses. Don't shoot the Pandas however. It's not ethical.
- Sanity: Aiken's Artifact has the main character forced to compete on a gameshow called "Trivia Insanity", where "One Wrong Answer, and You're Dead!". Two of the four contestants (the main character himself being one) are obviously there against their will, but the third one is actually determined to win the game, and is there of his own will. The fourth is given intentionally easy "questions", being the magician owning the show. Winning the game show leads to the player meeting him; but is really a type of boss battle. Only after he falls will he talk to you normally about the investigation.
- This is the Excuse Plot in The Ship: Murder Party, an online multiplayer FPS. Basically, you're on a ship and a crazy guy in a mask pays you to kill your shipmates while being hunted down yourself.
- Shack Tactical took this idea and adapted it to a mod of the ARMA engine. In their version, a large number of civilians have all been given a slow acting poison. If they kill their assigned quarry, they get enough of the cure to prolong their life, and a new quarry to kill. Meanwhile, odds are they're probably the quarry to one or more other poisoned people, and have to dodge the attempts of that person or people to kill them. Finally, there's the Wild Card of the local police, most of whom tend to be incompetent and overwhelmed by the inexplicable sudden crime wave, but a few may be Trigger-Happy, (if role-played that way) and occasionally some seem to be getting their jollies by using this as an excuse to kill a few people themselves...
- Showgunners follows the contestant Scarlett as she makes her way through the 78th season of Homicidal All-Stars, which besides from the defenders recruited from death row, includes spike traps, gun turrets, poisonous gas and flamethrowers as environmental challenges to avoid or use to your advantage.
- Smash TV has the players blasting their way through a maze filled with hordes of Mooks and gigantic cyborg bosses, all in the name of earning mountains of cash and fabulous prizes. Yay, a new VCR!
- Tales from the Borderlands has one in "Zer0 Sum", where Vaughn and Fiona get caught up in a Death Race run by Bossanova.
- Tekken 8 has Kazuya's new King of Iron Fist Tournament. This time, the prize is not control over the Mishima Zaibatsu, but the right to live: losers not only forfeit their lives, but their home countries will also be destroyed.
- Twisted Metal is about the eponymous competition, which thrusts drivers of heavily armed vehicles into urban combat with the prize of having a single wish granted, no matter how impossible. In reality the competition is merely a system of collecting souls for Hell, be they drivers that don't survive or just the innocent bystanders who get caught in the crossfire. The host himself is a Literal Genie who frequently doesn't honor the spirit of the wish, instead granting an ironic outcome. However, if the winner asks for a chance to wreak horrible bloody vengeance on someone who wronged them, then they'll usually get it.
- Your first encounter with Mettaton in Undertale has him forcing you to answer increasingly difficult game show questions, on pain of having half your health taken away for a wrong answer. Fortunately it's all part of Alphys and Mettaton's act; if you do badly enough Mettaton will skip to the last two questions, which are impossible to get wrong.
- Unreal Tournament series revolves around Liandri Corporation gathering world's finest mercenaries, freaks, robots and aliens to duke it out on old battlefields, orbital bases, factories and other interesting locations. Unreal Tournament III, set in the same continuity and being more serious in tone, applies gadgets from the tournament like respawners and Field Lattice Array Generators to conventional warfare.
- Geer'AH from Vangers hosts a ritual sports festival, which is not shown, but described in lush, juicy details. Participators are usually Valorins (aka Heroines), energetic and violent beeboorats originating from Ogorod escave. Nearly all those games feature said guys killing themselves in twisted ways. The most interesting part here is that you can end up as a participant of those games. Just try and bring Geer'AH something he does not like, more than one time, and you'll be sure to regret.
- The heroes of Wild ARMs 5 are offered a chance to be on TV, unfortunately it turns out to be on this sort of show. Surprisingly, the executive in charge has stated his distaste for the whole thing, but you can't argue with those kind of ratings.
- Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has "German or Else!", a game show where contestants must demonstrate their knowledge of the German languagenote Which the Nazis have absolutely pummeled into the American people or else they'll be sent to a re-education camp. You can tell the contestants are unnerved and sweating in fear. The show also counts as a warning that are only 173 days of English; after that, anyone caught speaking English will be immediately executed.
- World's End Club starts with a group of 10 kids trapped in an underwater amusement park, where a creature named Pielope forces them to play a "Game of Fate", a game where each contestant has to do a task assigned to them, but their task is written on someone else's wristband. The winner gets a Key of Fate and the rest get digested by a mechanical clown monster. However, as the trailers and intro suggests, not only does nobody die from the game, Pielope is suddenly destroyed and the whole "Game of Fate" is suddenly cancelled. The real mystery of World's End Club is what happened to the outside world while they were away.
- The World Ends with You has the Reapers' Game, where recently deceased teenagers have to complete seven tasks over seven days in order to win a shot at resurrection. Failure means that their existence is erased. Meanwhile, the Reapers try to hunt the players down in order to gain points for themselves and extend their lifespan.
- The sequel has slightly different rules. Players compete in teams, and at the end of the week, the top-ranked team gets to choose between coming back to life or continuing to play, while the lowest-ranked team is erased from existence.
