It had to happen eventually.
There have been whisperings of people running real-life versions of Squid Game, Hwang Dong-hyuk’s record-breaking Netflix thriller about contestants playing a series of life-or-death children’s games for money, ever since the show became a hit back in September.
With over 80 million subscribers, a track record of running games with cash prizes and a lot of money to fund such an endeavour, it’s not really any surprise that YouTuber MrBeast took on the challenge.
On Friday, his channel released an IRL version of the Netflix show (without the actual life or death bit, obviously), which saw 456 contestants playing (mostly) the same series of games from the show for a $456,000 top prize.
At the time of writing, the video has around 110 million views. It’s on track to become one of the creator’s most popular videos of all-time.
As you can see from those images, it’s clear a lot of work went into the set design. The individual games in the video — from “Red Light, Green Light” to “Glass Bridge” — all look impressively similar to the sets in the actual show. Based on MrBeast’s Twitter timeline, his team started work on the games back in mid-October, and as he reveals in the video itself the end result cost “over $3.5 million” to make (it’s his most expensive video of all-time).
Over 100 million views in four days is pretty huge, but maybe it’s not such a surprise.
Squid Game was watched for over 63 million hours in its first week on Netflix but became a massive word-of-mouth hit, clocking up over 448 million hours in its second week and over 571 million hours in its third week.
It’s now Netflix’s most popular show ever.
