The Cast Showoff: When Dynamo sings the aria from Act III of The Marriage of Figaro, he's actually singing in that scene! Erland Van Lidth De Jeude was an accomplished opera singer alongside his wrestling career and before his (unfortunately) brief foray into acting — he died of heart failure two months before the film's release at age 34.
Defictionalization: The technology used to frame Richards by digitally swapping his face with that of the real killer is now completely real.
Likewise, while the computer graphics technology to simulate all the other fake footage entirely from scratch is still rather expensive, the software and technical skill necessary to do so are all available to Hollywood and anyone else who can afford them, as recently demonstrated with Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing's likenesses in Rogue One. When this technology gets less expensive and more widely available to the public, we may never again be absolutely certain that any video record of anything hasn't been fabricated.
Also a case of Technology Marches On: Many of Richards' "escape" methods wouldn't happen today, in a world of cell phone cameras and GPS. And much of the technology in the movie seems to consist of blinking lights.
Also, as of 2016, there is a TV series called The Runner, with a rather similar (though presumably non-lethal) premise to the version of the game in the original story.
Disowned Adaptation: Of a sort. Stephen King was very unhappy with the changes made to the novel, to the point where he sued to have his name taken off of it. It's reported that he enjoyed the film, but considering the extent of the changes made (basically everything except a couple character names and a VERY basic version of the premise), he didn't consider it his story. They ended up using his pen name in the credits instead.
Dueling Movies: Not so much at the time, but in retrospect with RoboCop. Both movies:
Were released in 1987, take place 20 Minutes in the Future, and are set in a dystopic society where an elite few live in luxury while the masses live around them in squalor. Possibly intentional but both could be seen as satire of Ronald Reagan's America.
Despite their future setting the hairstyles, fashions, music, and other things are so '80s it's painful.
Are ultraviolent movies with an undertone that violence as a form of entertainment is bad.
Feature two villains who (at the time) were playing against type. Richard Dawson and Jim Brown in Running Man and Ronny Cox and Kurtwood Smith in RoboCop.
Life Imitates Art: Two years after the movie came out, American Gladiators debuted on television. Although it was obviously nowhere near as lethal or gory and didn't use criminals as contestants, the basic premise of pitting regular people against professional athletes in special contests was the same.
Technology Marches On: In light of the film being set in the 2010s and filmed in the 1980s.
Audience members who go on stage to choose their favorite Stalkers are handled VHS boxes as the Stalkers manage to harm or close in on the victims. The format has become obsolete since the rise of the DVD and was discontinued in the early 2000s.
The "tapes" which are shown to be in containers about the size of 3.5" floppy disks. Ironically, these are actually much larger than some of the Micro-SD cards we have right now which can easily store an entire DVD image containing both sides of this movie's double-sided DVD (containing both a full-screen and wide-screen version of the movie, and lots of extras). Some of those cards even have enough storage space that they could easily fit an uncompressed version of this movie a dozen times over, never mind the few minutes of digital footage from Richards' last mission these "tapes" contained.
Andrew Davis was originally going to direct the film (after three previous directors pulled out) but was fired a week into production due to going overbudget and being four days behind schedule. Paul Michael Glaser was hired at the recommendation of Michael Mann and finished the film.
, with a rather similar (though presumably non-lethal) premise to the version of the game in the original story.