The history of Manhunt
Manhunt is a folk game: nobody invented it, and it has no official rulebook. It combines two of the oldest children's games, hide-and-seek and tag, with the jail and rescue idea found in centuries-old games like prisoner's base, kick the can and ringolevio. Its name borrows the word for a police search for a fugitive.
On this page
Ask ten people how to play Manhunt and you’ll get ten slightly different answers, and that is the best clue to where the game comes from. Manhunt was never invented, published or trademarked. It was passed from older kids to younger kids in backyards, cul-de-sacs, summer camps and school fields, picking up local rules as it went.
What follows is what can be said with confidence, and where the evidence runs out.
The short version
| Era | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2nd century AD | Julius Pollux describes a hide-and-seek game, apodidraskinda. |
| 14th century | King Edward III orders that prisoner’s base (“bars”) not be played in the avenues of the Palace of Westminster. |
| First half of the 20th century (US) | Kick the can (popular by the 1930s) and New York City’s ringolevio (well attested by the 1940s–50s) combine hiding, chasing, jail and mass rescues. |
| Late 20th century (exact date undocumented) | “Manhunt” becomes a common name in the US for night-time team hide-and-seek and tag, alongside names like Jailbreak. |
| 2001 onward | GPS makes location-based chase games possible, from Can You See Me Now? (2001) to geocaching (2000) and, in the 2020s, apps for real-life Manhunt. |
The ingredients
Hide-and-seek
The oldest part of Manhunt. The Greek writer Julius Pollux, in the 2nd century AD, described a game called apodidraskinda in which one player closes their eyes while the others hide, which is recognizably hide-and-seek (Britannica; Wikipedia, citing Pollux’s Onomasticon). Nearly every culture has a version.
Tag
Chasing and touching is older than writing. Manhunt’s contribution is that the chase happens after a search, so the hider has to decide when to stay hidden and when to run.
Prisoners and rescues
The idea that captured players are held in a “prison” and can be freed by teammates is what separates Manhunt from plain hide-and-seek. That idea is centuries old. Prisoner’s base, a team chase game in which caught players are held and can be rescued, was played in 14th-century England, when King Edward III ordered that the game, then called bars or barres, not be played in the avenues of the Palace of Westminster (Wikipedia: Darebase / prisoner’s base).
Kick the can
Kick the can was widely played in the United States by the Great Depression of the 1930s; its exact origin is unknown (Wikipedia). It needed nothing but an empty can, which made it a favorite in hard times. One player guards the can; hiders who are spotted go to jail; and anyone who kicks the can frees everyone. Manhunt’s jailbreak, a single daring run that frees every prisoner, is the same moment in a different costume.
Ringolevio
Ringolevio, a street game remembered from 1940s and 1950s Brooklyn and the Bronx, is the closest ancestor to team Manhunt. Two teams each have a jail; players hunt, capture and hold members of the other team, and a rescuer frees their teammates by tagging them and shouting “All in!” (Wikipedia). It was known for being rough, which is one reason modern Manhunt settles on a simple touch tag.
Where the name comes from
A manhunt, in ordinary English, is an organized search for a person, usually a fugitive. It’s a word from newspapers and police work. At some point in the 20th century, children in the United States borrowed it for their night-time hide-and-seek, and it stuck, because it describes the game perfectly: a team searching an area for people who don’t want to be found.
Nobody has documented exactly when or where the name was first used for the game. What is clear is that it spread widely in the US and Canada, and that the same game is also called Jailbreak or Jail, and related games go by Releaseo, Relievo and Police and Thief in different places (Wikipedia; Iona and Peter Opie’s Children’s Games in Street and Playground, 1969, documents Relievo and its British relatives). The names change; the jail, the hunt and the rescue stay.
“Olly olly oxen free”
The call used to end a round, meaning “everyone can come out, you won’t be caught,” is older than Manhunt and is shared with hide-and-seek and kick the can. Its origin is genuinely uncertain. A common theory is that it’s a garbled version of “all ye, all ye, outs in free”; others suggest a German or Dutch root. Whatever it once meant, it’s still the best way to end a game.
The GPS era
For most of its history, Manhunt had one big problem: in a large area, a good hider could stay hidden forever, and the game would stall. House rules like “runners must keep moving” and “no guarding the jail” tried to fix that on the honor system.
Location-aware phones changed what was possible. In 2001 the artists’ group Blast Theory staged Can You See Me Now? in Sheffield, UK: runners on real streets chased online players using GPS, and the piece went on to win a Prix Ars Electronica award (Blast Theory). Geocaching began in May 2000, and the decade brought a wave of experimental location games. By the 2020s, almost every teenager carried a GPS device, and apps for real-life hide-and-seek began to appear.
The idea behind the Manhunt app comes straight from that history: keep everything that makes the playground game great (the jail, the jailbreak, the touch tag, the dark), and use the phone only to fix what used to cause arguments: time, boundaries, fair tags, and the stalemate of a runner who never moves. Pings reveal a fuzzy circle, never an exact location, so hiding still matters.
Other things called Manhunt
The word “manhunt” is used by many unrelated things. To be clear about what this site is and isn’t about:
- Manhunt (video game). A 2003 stealth video game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games, followed by Manhunt 2 in 2007. It is a mature-rated video game and has nothing to do with the outdoor game except its name. We’re not affiliated with Rockstar or Take-Two.
- Minecraft Manhunt. A YouTube video format, popularized by the creator Dream, starting with a video on 26 December 2019 (Wikipedia), in which one player tries to beat Minecraft while a group of hunters tries to stop them. It’s a different game, but it shares the spirit of one against many, and it inspired the Speedrunner Manhunt IRL variation.
- Films and TV series. Several films and TV dramas are called Manhunt, most of them about real-life police searches.
- Other apps and services. Several apps and websites use the name. This site is about the game.
Sources and further reading
- Britannica: apodidraskinda
- Blast Theory: Can You See Me Now?
- Iona and Peter Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground (Oxford, 1969)
- Wikipedia: Manhunt (urban game), Hide-and-seek, Kick the can, Ringolevio, Darebase / prisoner’s base, Olly olly oxen free, Can You See Me Now?, Minecraft Manhunt, Manhunt (video game).
Know a regional name or rule we’ve missed? We collect them. Email hello@manhuntgame.com and tell us where you played.