‘Squid Game’ was the biggest show in Netflix’s history and a real version of the game without the killing sounded like it could be a lot of fun – sadly the reality ended up being something very different though.
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Rolling Stone have just published a report where they spoke to a number of people involved in the game who claim that it was rigged and they had to compete in torturous and inhumane condition. There’s no point me summarising it, so here’s the ‘best’ bits from the report about it:
“It was just the cruelest, meanest thing I’ve ever been through.
We were a human horse race, and they were treating us like horses out in the cold racing and [the race] was fixed.
All the torment and trauma we experienced wasn’t due to the game or the rigor of the game. It was the incompetencies of scale — they bit off more than they could chew.”
Four former players have detailed their experiences to Rolling Stone, confirming earlier reports that contestants were forced to play the show’s “Red Light, Green Light” game in inhumane conditions, spending up to nine hours inside a freezing airport hangar, unable to move for 30-minute stretches, with medics rushing in to tend to people who were unable to take the extreme cold. All requested that their names be withheld, citing their NDAs.
They also claim that some of the contestants, including TikTok and Instagram influencers, appeared to be pre-selected to advance, regardless of how they did in the first game.
“It really wasn’t a game show. It was a TV show, and we were basically extras in a TV show,” one of the contestants said.
Three former players describe what contestants are now calling the “38-second massacre,” when a large group of contestants made it across the finish line with time remaining on the clock, meaning they had successfully made it through to the next round. However, as they waited for producers to go over footage and get drone shots from the round, their blood squib packs went off minutes later, and they were told they had been eliminated, despite making it across the finish line. “They went crazy,” one contestant recalls.
Beyond the brutal conditions, the former contestants allege they witnessed clear signs of players being pre-selected to advance to the next round. One says they noticed only the players who were fully mic’d up being taken away to film before the game started, cameras following them as they mingled with other mic’d-up players. Two say they saw some contestants clearly moving when they were supposed to be frozen, yet weren’t eliminated. One claims they saw a contestant eliminated, only to be added back to the game.
Another says she was eliminated when there were five seconds remaining on the clock at the end of the gruelling nine hours. But as she waited to be escorted off the set, she says she noticed cameras pointed at a contestant who was playing with his mother. “This kid is sitting at the finish line, he’s crying, and cameras are on him and he’s waiting for his mom. They added [more time] to the clock for her to get across because she was one of the people that they wanted to be in the show.”
Well, that doesn’t sound too good for those involved does it? Apparently loads of the contestants are clubbing together to sue Netflix because of it as well, so it doesn’t sound too good for Netflix either. Although ironically this already sounds like a great basis for a Netflix documentary. They couldn’t, could they?
For more of the same, check out when Mr Beast built his own real life ‘Squid Game’ stage. Only cost him $2 million.
