MrBeast's Real-Life 'Squid Game' Nears One Billion Views — and Still Defines YouTube's Spectacle Era

It cost $3.5 million to make, runs for 25 minutes and has been watched more than 982 million times. "$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!", uploaded by the American creator Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, on November 24, 2021, remains the most-viewed long-form video on the biggest channel in YouTube history — and, at the time of writing, it is closing in on a billion views, a milestone almost no piece of online video has ever reached.

A television phenomenon, rebuilt in a warehouse

The premise was borrowed wholesale from Netflix's South Korean drama *Squid Game*, in which 456 debt-ridden contestants play children's games for a fortune, with lethal consequences for the losers. Donaldson recreated the series as a real competition: 456 players, cast from his enormous online audience, competed through the show's games for a $456,000 grand prize. Nobody's life was at stake. Eliminated players were sent home with at least $2,000 each, and the "deaths" were simulated with small devices that burst fake blood on a contestant's chest.

The scale of the production startled even television professionals. Of the $3.5 million budget, about $2 million went on sets and production and $1.5 million on cash prizes. Crews rebuilt the show's dormitory, its tug-of-war platform suspended in the air, the pastel-coloured indoor playground and the glass bridge, in faithful detail. The games followed the series in order: Red Light, Green Light, played beneath a replica of the show's giant doll; the dalgona candy-cutting challenge; marbles; tug of war; the tile-stepping ddakji; and the glass bridge. In the one major departure, the final round replaced the show's squid game with musical chairs, and player 079 emerged as the winner.

The Los Angeles Times calculated that the video cost about $134,600 for every minute of screen time — more than three times the per-minute cost of the Netflix series it copied, which itself ran to roughly $43,500 a minute. The project began almost as a dare: in October 2021 Donaldson promised on TikTok that he would build the sets if a post reached 10 million likes. It did, and construction began within days, partly funded by Supercell, the maker of the mobile game Brawl Stars, which sponsored the video.

A rise faster than anything YouTube had seen

The response broke records for the platform. The video passed 100 million views within days of release and 130 million within a week, becoming the most-watched video of Donaldson's career to that point. It eventually overtook the view count of the Netflix series itself, a comparison that delighted YouTube executives and irritated television traditionalists in equal measure. Jon Youshaei, then a senior YouTube marketing executive, praised the video online as proof of "the promise of the creator economy" — one creator, no network, fewer gatekeepers. The post drew such a backlash from people who argued it erased the work of the show's creators that he deleted it.

Advertisers noticed, too. Brawl Stars recorded a 41 percent increase in downloads and a 54 percent increase in revenue in the six days after the video appeared, an early, vivid demonstration that a single creator video could move a consumer market the way a television campaign once did. Donaldson's channel, which had about 76 million subscribers when the video launched, has since grown past 500 million, making him the most-subscribed individual creator on Earth.

Praise, backlash and a television career

Reaction split along a fault line that still runs through the creator economy. *Squid Game*'s creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, was generous, saying at the 2021 Gotham Awards that he loved the recreation and that it helped promote his show. Reviewers praised the accuracy of the sets; CNET called the re-enactment "scarily real-looking". But critics at Vice and Polygon argued that restaging an anti-capitalist fable as cheerful stunt entertainment, with desperate people competing for cash for an audience's amusement, reproduced exactly what the drama condemned. Others noted the irony that the video's success rested on work Donaldson had not created — the games, the imagery and the global fame of the series were Netflix's.

Donaldson, for his part, kept building. The format — hundreds of contestants, life-changing prizes, sets the size of warehouses — became the template for his Amazon Prime Video series *Beast Games*, launched in 2024, and for a string of ever-larger competition videos. Nearly five years on, the original is still gaining views by the million, less a leftover of a 2021 craze than the founding document of a new kind of television: made by one man, financed like a studio production, and distributed to an audience larger than any broadcast network can assemble.