Run For Money: Tousou Gokko

» see litmus-ent.jp/runformoney as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

逃走中 has been on Fuji Television since 2004. Celebrities are released into a sealed location and men in black suits and sunglasses walk after them at a steady pace, never running. A prize pot ticks upward for every second you stay uncaught, and getting caught zeroes it. The English title Fuji uses for it is Run For Money, and the format has travelled well beyond Japan.

UUUM is a talent agency for YouTubers, the biggest in Japan, and it had a games arm: LiTMUS, a wholly owned subsidiary that produced and operated phone titles. One of those was 脱獄ごっこ, a prison-break game with the same asymmetric shape, a few players running and one chasing. In March 2022 the two things were put together. The announcement went up on 4 March with pre-registration, and the game launched on 1 April 2022 with its first season.

The match was four runners against one hunter. Ten keys sat around the map inside balloons, the runners had to collect all of them between them to open the exit, and only the players who made it through the open exit won. The hunter won by taking everyone down before the clock ran out. Items were scattered where either side could reach them, and missions fired mid-match that paid out if completed and added another hunter if failed. It was a licensed tie-in built on a studio's existing engine, a description that usually promises something cynical, and it shipped with four distinct modes.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ hunters and runners ~

Scramble was the big format, six runners against two hunters over fifteen keys, with items only the hunters could pick up. Royale dropped the human hunter entirely and turned the keys into a competition between five runners, since attacking another runner took whatever they were carrying. Casual was the small one: no keys at all, just three players trying to last three minutes on a map shrunk to a quarter of its usual size.

Two of those four stopped working before the servers did. The Japanese wiki records Scramble and Casual as unplayable late in the game's life, for matchmaking reasons. Put less gently: the mode existed and the players did not. A game can be dead in its own menus for months while the home screen still loads.

~ the television it came from ~

The timeline reads like a product doing fine. Scramble and a unified ranking in May 2022. Season three and a half-anniversary event that October. In July 2023 the operating structure changed and the whole interface was rebuilt. Missions arrived that October. On 1 April 2024 the second anniversary event opened and the game passed a million downloads.

Sixteen months after that milestone it was over. LiTMUS announced the end on 19 June 2025 and the service stopped at 15:00 on 31 July. A million downloads across two years is not a vanity figure for a licensed phone game, and it was still not enough to keep four lobby formats populated, which says more about what free multiplayer needs than any failure on this game's part.

~ the family it died with ~

脱獄ごっこ, the game this one was derived from, was announced for closure within the same year. The survivor is 脱獄ごっこPRO, the sequel, which absorbed the goodwill and the giveaway campaigns. So UUUM's games arm spent 2025 retiring the original alongside its television crossover, and kept only the newest build.

The show is still running. 逃走中 passed its twentieth year in 2024 and got a feature film that July, while the phone game built from it lasted three years and four months. The licensing slot it occupied is presumably open again.

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