Real-life Squid Game Hits 100 Million Views in 4 Days

There have been whispers about people running real-life Squid Game, Hwang Dong-record-breaking hyuk’s Netflix drama about competitors who play a series of children’s games for money, on life and death, since the series premiered in September.

MrBeast, a YouTuber with over 80 million subscribers, a reputation for hosting games with cash awards, and enough resources to bankroll such an operation, took up the task. On Friday, his channel aired an IRL version of the Netflix show (without the life-or-death parts), in which 456 people competed for a top prize of $456,000.

The video has approximately 110 million views as of this writing. He’s on his way to becoming one of the most popular videos in the creator’s history.

As you can see from the photographs, the set design took a lot of time and effort. The video’s individual games, ranging from “Red Light, Green Light” to “Glass Bridge,” are all strikingly identical to the actual show’s setups. MrBeast’s Twitter timeline shows that his team began playing games in mid-October. As he states in the video, the final product cost “more than $3.5 million” to produce (making it his most expensive video to date).

Real life Squid Game with 456 people goes live today at 4pm Eastern 🙂 pic.twitter.com/vC7S54AVk0

— MrBeast (@MrBeast) November 24, 2021

Over 100 million views in four days are impressive, but perhaps not surprising.

Squid Game received over 63 million hours of viewing in its first week on Netflix, but it quickly became a huge word-of-mouth hit, receiving over 448 million hours in its second week and over 571 million hours in its third week.