Contestant 299 lets out a guttural shriek before dropping to the floor in convulsions. He has just failed Squid Game: The Challenge’s Dalgona challenge, which sees players use a needle to delicately cut out shapes stamped into a piece of honeycomb. His decision to yield to three other group leaders and select the umbrella pattern over the simpler square, circle and triangle options has just cost him and about 40 others the chance to win $4.56m. “I think some of them are going to remember me for the rest of their lives as the person who ruined their chances of becoming a millionaire,” he says. It’s moments like these that are leading people to question the ethicality of Netflix’s decision to adapt its hit 2021 dystopian thriller series, Squid Game, into a real-life competition series.
Just like the original South Korean drama, Squid Game: The Challenge (the final of which airs tonight) sees 456 money-desperate individuals compete in various challenges of wit, physicality and luck for a chance to win a vast sum of cash – the biggest jackpot in TV history, in fact. But instead of being summarily executed like in the fictional series, contestants have an ink pack strapped to their chest that explodes when they are eliminated.
