To win the grand prize of one million German marks, a candidate has to survive seven days on the run while being hunted by the Köhler gang.

After almost a week without sleep and little food, he is in agony and on the verge of physical collapse; Lotz could drop out, but there is the prospect of the grand prize of one million marks, and he knows the fate of one of his predecessors: when he forfeited the game, he was so derided as a coward that he eventually committed suicide.

In the grand finale, Lotz has to pass through the "death spiral" – a 28.40-meter-long tube of bulletproof glass with three openings through which the Köhler gang can shoot him.

Intentionally "exaggerat[ing] the contemporary situation [in television] and project[ing] it into the future in order to illuminate the present", as Günter Rohrbach, then head of TV programming at WDR, said at the time,[3][4] the film anticipated developments in the media, such as commercial television (which did not exist in Germany until 1984), the drive for ratings, reality shows, the Big Brother effect, and constant interruptions by highly sexualized advertisements.

Before the broadcast in 1970, an announcer said that "the rules of the game were in accordance with the January 7, 1973, federal law promoting leisure activities, as published in Bundesgesetzblatt (Germany), part 2, page 965".

In the same year, a novel by Stephen King, published in the U.S., told a similar story; the 1987 film The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger is loosely based on this novel.

[1] The fictitious television show, including musical interludes, and the final sequence of the manhunt in the glass tunnel were filmed in the Gartlage hall in Osnabrück,[4] a building normally used for livestock auctions.

The comedian Dieter Hallervorden, who played the leader of the Köhler gang, was then still at the beginning of his acting career; he became known by the mid-1970s for the slapstick series Nonstop Nonsense.