Before the 2010s, the battle royale genre had some formative aspects. Since Bomberman in the 1990s, which introduced multiplayer game modes where players all started with the same minimal abilities and collected power ups and fought until the last player was left standing, last man standing rules have been a common staple of multiplayer online action games, though usually with fewer total players. Through survival games, the concepts of foraging and living on a sizable open-world environment became more widely known.
The basic rules of the genre were established by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, which was based on the 1999 novel of the same name by Koushun Takami and its 2000 manga adaptation. These rules included the requirement for players to scavenge for weapons and items and the requirement to kill each other until only one person remained. The game took place on a shrinking map. It quickly sparked a wave of Japanese manga and anime with a battle royale theme, including Gantz (2000), Future Diary (2006), and Btooom! (2009). Eventually, The Hunger Games franchise adopted the battle royale premise. Btooom! and the Phantom Bullet (Gun Gale Online) arc of the light novel series Sword Art Online (2010 in print) both featured fictional battle royale computer games such
as the "Bullet of Bullets" competition in the Phantom Bullet (Gun Gale Online) arc in the light novel series Sword Art Online (2010 in print).
Early video game adaptations of the Battle Royale paradigm included Japanese visual novel titles like Danganronpa (2010), Zero Escape (2009), and Higurashi: When They Cry (2002), which were puzzle-based games with a storytelling element. These visual novel games, however, are not the same as the genre that subsequently evolved into battle royale games, thanks to a later adaptation of the Battle Royale idea into a shooting game format by Western creators.
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