Trying to start up your own dystopian allegory for the brutal realities of income inequality? Can’t remember which nefarious exploitations of the clawing lower class were already covered by the instigators of the events depicted in the hit Korean drama Squid Game?
Not to worry. There were six group games to play on the show – seven, if you count ddakji, the version of pogs that Gi-hun plays in the subway station while a guy slaps him a bunch. Here’s a walk down this horrible memory lane while we wait patiently for Squid Game 2.
Red Light/Green Light
Everyone was ready to have a good, fun time, weren’t they? They thought they were going to play an innocent game of Red Light/Green Light with a bunch of neat strangers in tracksuits and a suspiciously crazy-eyed robot.
Then the game got started, and everybody that got caught moving after the robot said “red light” found themselves in possession of a surgically precise, computer-guided bullet to the dome. In retrospect, this would’ve been a great time for everyone to cut their losses, but you know what they say: “Nightmarish parables commenting on the grim nature of poverty gonna be nightmarish.”
Ppopgi
This one was a little less familiar to a lot of viewers tuning in to Squid Game stateside. In the third episode of the series, players were given a delectable disc of honeycomb candy with a simple shape pressed into its center. Traditionally, Korean street vendors have offered this treat to kids with the promise that they’ll receive a second honeycomb candy free of charge if they can eat around the indented shape without breaking it. This being Squid Game, the prize for extracting the shape here was markedly more punishing than the promise of encroaching diabetes. Instead of a second candy, contestants would be treated to a single helping of not getting shot in the gourd.
Tug of War
Game three was easy, fun, and straightforward: Everybody played tug-of-war. You remember tug-of-war. Two crews of able-bodied comrades each took one side of a long rope, trying to pull the opposing team across a boundary in the middle through force, guile, and perseverance. To add a little pizzazz to the proceedings, participants were tasked with playing the game on a pair of raised platforms, with the losing team falling to their painful and horrific deaths. This is the sort of team building opportunity that a lot of companies pay good money for, but the philanthropists in charge of the events depicted in Squid Game did it for free.
Free time with marbles
The fourth game: Marbles. “Marbles isn’t a game,” you might say, and you’d be part way correct. Marbles are a toy, with a bunch of games built around them – marbles, for instance. The Squid Game bosses, understanding the importance of unstructured play time, allowed contestants to choose their own marble games. The only rule: Whoever loses gets – let me finish – yes, shot in the head.
Breaky glassy fall down
The only game in the series that doesn’t lift its premise from a childhood pastime, the fifth event in Squid Game involves trying to walk across intermittently breakable panes of glass. Picking the right glass panes means walking to the opposite side of the arena, markedly unmurdered. Pick wrong, and you fall to your death. It’s more or less a given by now that you’ll get shot if you don’t play the game, so everyone more or less goes along with this combination of Rainbow Road from Mario Kart and the “In Latin, Jehovah starts with an I” scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Squid
It just wouldn’t be Squid Game without a rousing round of a squid game. The eponymous event is described in the show’s opening sequence – a sort of combination of hopscotch and beating each other up. By the time the squid game rolls around in the first season of the show, the majority of the event’s contestants have died, mostly thanks to all those no-scopes that the rich folk antagonists used as the stick to their cash prize carrot. Only Gi-hun and his old childhood buddy Sang-Woo were still in the running at this point, playing a bleak, knife-heavy reflection of the game they played as children. Gi-hun wins, thanks to an obscure rule from the kiddie version of the game where you lose if you stab yourself in the neck and die.
