The hit Netflix show is making waves in GTA Online
Netflix’s Squid Game has taken the world by storm, and now it’s taking over Grand Theft Auto V role-playing servers. GTA fans are recreating the show’s grim children’s games across the streets of Los Santos. Winners get big cash prizes while the losers get sued into oblivion by Take-Two. Just kidding, that’s a joke. Mostly.
Squid Game is about desperate people risking their lives to compete in absurd mini-games for a shot at a slightly less immiserated life. In other words, it sounds like a perfect fit for Rockstar’s sociopathic sandox about killing people to get rich and then feeling empty inside. As reported by Gamesradar, GTA 5 fans have started using mods and making online servers recreating specific contests from the South Korean survival drama, like the infamous Red Light, Green Light.
In one version of Squid Game’s opening challenge recreated in GTA 5, a group of players have to cross a field while another gives orders over a mic, with a third group sitting ready to shoot anyone who messes up. Players have inserted other elements from the show as well, including its terrifying robot doll, the glass stepping stones game, and even the contestants’ sleeping quarters maze. GTA YouTuber Vadact showed off some of these recreations in a recent video—at first glance it would be easy to confuse them with a full-fledged mod for the surprise Netflix hit.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos announced at the beginning of the month that Squid Game, pop culture’s latest unsettling parody of class warfare on the poor, had already become its most popular show ever. It’s since blown up in Tik-Tok memes and the Roblox community. Now Netflix itself is preparing to merchandize the shit out of it. The Korean Cultural Center in the United Arab Emirates is even set to perform a reenactment of it in Abu Dhabi, a city with a track record of exploited worker camps.