We’ve had decades of humans hunting other humans for sport or the entertainment of others for a while now, so I suppose there are similarities. With the Hunger Games, at least the first book, author Suzanne Collins kind of went out of the way to avoid having Katniss getting her hands dirty with the unpleasantness of surviving the games. King doesn’t do this in The Running Man as he kills a few officers the first time they catch up to him. But then one was a book for kids and the other for adults.
And it was a Richard Bachman book before it was known King was Bachman. Like much of his work as Bachman it was more violent and didn’t rely on supernatural suspense. Misery was going to be a Bachman book. The onscreen credit in the original movie was to Bachman at King’s insistence.
Yeah, that whole area is ripe for exploration.