Having watched and been profoundly unsettled by Squid Game, I felt some surprise upon seeing the reveal of Squid Game: Unleashed earlier this month. The new video game adaptation from Boss Fight at Netflix Games repurposes the show’s brutal games into madcap multiplayer experiences. There’s still gore, but it’s cartoonish. And dissimilar to the characters of Squid Game, death is not the end for any of these participants. You can keep on trying over and over until you perfect these not-so-deadly virtual versions of the originally-quite-deadly games.
From Squid Game: Unleashed to the upcoming Call of Duty crossover with Squid Game, and even the real-life recreation of the concept seen in YouTuber Mr. Beast’s Squid Game, every single attempt at gamifying Squid Game arguably misses the point of the show. But this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. Remember the similar brutality and social commentary of the novel Battle Royale (1999), which was adapted into the widespread video game genre phenomenon of the same name (as seen in PUBG and Fortnite). Battle Royale the novel is a raw depiction of a fascist regime that dehumanizes its countries’ children through a deadly, performative version of military conscription. In the book, getting enlisted in the titular battle royale is the worst thing that could happen to you. All of that original intention has been lost in subsequent recreations like Fortnite, which is fun, and has Snoop Dogg in it.
All of that is why it actually shouldn’t surprise me to see Squid Game: Unleashed and its ilk. The game’s director, Bill Jackson, told me in a recent interview that this type of adaptation is exactly what the players asked for — as opposed to, say, a Telltale Games-esque narrative game set in Squid Game’s world that preserves the original TV show’s social commentary and intense storytelling style. Nope, people didn’t want that. They wanted to compete in the games.
“We asked the players, the members, if we’re making games at Netflix, what would you want to see? And the first answer, and it was a huge delta, was Squid Game,” Jackson told me. “And we asked, ‘You like that? What do you want to do?’ And their answer was with, again, overwhelmingly, ‘I want to be a contestant and I want to play those games and try to live, and I’m fine if that means I fail and I die. And it could be brutal.’ And that was very clear from the first times we talked to members. So we wanted to make that true. Now, that’s still a hard mission, but we did. I really think that’s what we tried to deliver here is you’re going to be — you play the role of a contestant on a stylized version of that show.”
Squid Game: Unleashed is inherently different from the source material by dint of its medium. As Jackson put it: “The main thing is you are a contestant and the penalties are brutal if you don’t win. But guess what? It’s a video game. If you fail, let’s try again. And that’s really ultimately the loop of it.”
At this point in the interview, I actually asked Jackson about Battle Royale and its influences on video games, and he noted how much more prevalent this type of story has become across all mediums. “You can go back into the movies — Death Race — there’s all these kind of setups like this. Or Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon. It’s the same. It’s like — it’s the same kind of influences. But in video games, yes, it is a profound setup, right? We’re going to put you in a competition and the penalty is fairly — that you’ll be knocked out, and others will move on. That pattern is — it’s intrinsic to video games. It’s intrinsic to us.”
As weird as it may seem, people like it. It’s not some executive at Netflix demanding that the in-house game designers take all the social commentary out of Squid Game and turn it into something more palatable. It’s the players themselves — regular people — who can’t help but crave competing in the games, just to see how they’d do, if it came to it. But of course, these players want to do it in a safe virtual realm, where death doesn’t matter, but bragging rights still do.
That doesn’t mean that people miss what really matters about the story of Squid Game, or that all of these people are just stupid or superficial, or something. I think, like Jackson said, this impulse reflects something else, something intrinsic, about all of us. It may be a bit creepy, but that’s the reason why all of these adaptations are popping up in this type of format. We asked for it.
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