It s running man (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) as a realistic pseudo doku, 17 years before running man .A TV show offers 1 million if you survive 1 week and make it to the studio checkpoint, while being hunted by 3 killers.It s basically a mix of a roman gladiator game and the seek of fame an wealth of TV shows.Often copied but never been made as good as the original.It s made like a TV show of that time, being so realistic for some pll. watching it phoned the broadcaster for joining the next show or "i hate it" calls. (greetings from "war of the worlds" radio broadcast.fun comment: one of the killers is a German comedian, who played the role of a killer really well if you see his other acting.

This is definitely a great made-for-TV film and much has been made how realistic it was. So realistic that it fooled some people into believing it was a real show as opposed to a movie. I think it is an excellent movie, there is just one problem: the style is very movie-like (the camera for most of the time is "invisible" for the actors). It is explained that many camera teams are filming/recording/transmitting all the time to cover the events. But there are many scenes like when the "victim" is in a house under fire, the camera operator would be in danger of being shot and the camera angles are "cinema" -like, not anything like documentary footage. the same when the "victim" decides to fool the taxi central station by changing his mind where he wants to go. Where is the car with the camera team and why does the "victim" behave as if he wasn't filmed even though we see close-ups of him all the time and a freeze-frame of this exact footage in the main studio of the program as if it was transmitted video footage? A lot of contradictions here. Might have been fine back in 1970 where people didn't ask that many questions..... Just my humble input. Still a German TV classic and I am glad it has been aired a few times again recently after decades.

"Das Millionenspiel" ("Million-Game") is a fictional reality-TV show of a fictional private TV-station named "TE-TV".In the show, Contestant Bernard Lotz is hunted through (western-) Germany for a week by a group of hired killers and has, he and the killers being constantly monitored by 24 camera teams, to reach a series of checkpoints in order to win 1 million German mark (an enormous amount of money - consider the inflation).In an - for Europe and Germany, where privately owned television stations were not very usual until the 1980's - almost prophetic manner the film draws a picture of a future full of private TV stations and reality-TV-shows competing for market-share.The film is starring a series of famous German TV moderators and actors and features some bizarre fake-advertisements.Worth watching.

"Das Millionenspiel" was locked away for 30 years due to copyright difficulties. It was made into a French film, Le Prix du Danger in 1983, based on the same short story by the great Robert Sheckley. But "made for television" was surely more appropriate than for the big screen. It was so visionary and presented in such a way that spectators took it for real and applied at the TV station to take part as the hunted person (I personally read some of the letters). The letters were handed out to the University of Cologne to conduct a psychological survey back in 1972.