Every Odd Similarity Between Squid Game Season 3 And Beast Games

Contains spoilers for "Squid Game" Season 3

"Squid Game" is a show about the rich and powerful creating a series of sick, twisted games for poor people to play. "Beast Games" is, well, also a show about the rich and powerful creating a series of sick, twisted games for poor people to play. That may seem like hyperbole, but lest we forget, "Beast Games" has a shady side that could make some of the "Squid Game" VIPs blush. 

MrBeast clearly has an affinity for the South Korean Netflix series. In 2021, just a few months after the first season of "Squid Game" came out, MrBeast released a YouTube video where he recreated the series (minus the rampant death, of course). Contestants played the same games as they did on the show, from Red Light, Green Light to tug-of-war. It was a clear attempt to capitalize on the show's success, but MrBeast would soon offer his own answer to "Squid Game" with "Beast Games," a reality competition series that debuted on Amazon Prime Video at the end of 2024. "Beast Games" consists of games, thought experiments, and players screwing one another over, so in truth, it's not all that dissimilar to "Squid Game." 

With "Squid Game" Season 3 coming out just a few months after "Beast Games" ended, it's kind of fascinating to consider the ways in which the two seasons overlap. Here are all the ways "Squid Game" Season 3 and "Beast Games" Season 1 are similar.

It's no secret that many people are struggling to afford even the basic necessities nowadays. The prospect of receiving millions of dollars and finally getting some financial stability is a dream come true for anyone who isn't already in the top 1%. "Beast Games" promised $5 million for the winner, the largest cash prize in reality TV history. In the end, it was doubled to $10 million after one of the contestants took a chance on a coin flip. With that much money on the line, some folks aren't always willing to play the game fair. 

"Squid Game" has always had some unsportsmanlike conduct, but it gets taken to another level in Season 3. Myung-gi (Im Si-wan) and Nam-gyu (Roh Jae-won) kill more people than they need to during hide-and-seek to cull the herd. Players push one another off the platform during the jump rope challenge. If Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) hadn't intervened, Player 096 (Lee Suk) wouldn't have allowed anyone else to cross the finish line. With lives on the line, many people suddenly become very okay with murdering others. 

"Beast Games" doesn't go to that extreme, of course, but many competitors will do whatever it takes to get an advantage. In Episode 4, there's a challenge where players have to hold a ball and try to drop it as close to the timer reaching "0:00" as they can. Everyone counts down from 10 minutes, but one woman yells out numbers at random to throw others off. It was seen as an underhanded tactic and didn't win her many friends later. In both shows, neither of these are considered cheating. They're playing by the rules despite it disenfranchising numerous other players.

The fundamental question asked by the trolley problem is: Who is worth saving? If you have two different sets of people tied to different train tracks, how should you position the train to cause the least amount of damage? Some may simply say that you should direct the train to hit the fewest number of individuals. However, things get more complicated if you have family or friends tied to either side, which could make you kill more people for the sake of saving a loved one. Unsurprisingly, "Squid Game" and "Beast Games" both love the trolley problem, just in slightly different ways. 

"Squid Game" Season 3 stages the jump rope challenge using train tracks that call to mind the trolley problem. The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) offers Gi-hun a choice to kill the remaining players in exchange for his and a newborn baby's safety. The show poses a question nobody wants to answer: How many people are worth killing in order to save the life of an infant who hasn't even had a chance to begin living yet?

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that "Beast Games" is much blunter with its trolley problem allegory. Episode 7 of the reality series sees MrBeast literally place two options on train tracks. For example, the first one of these challenges involves a player deciding whether to save three other contestants or take home a Lamborghini. He decides to win the car, and few people blame him for the choice. The trolley problems get subsequently more difficult, with MrBeast specifically placing players' friends on the train tracks to see whether they save them. 

It's one thing to want millions of dollars to buy yourself nice cars and luxuries, but, in both shows, there are cases of people wanting to use the money to help their child. It's inherently a more altruistic goal, and both "Squid Game" and "Beast Games" contain plot points of someone entering the games for the benefit of their sick child who needs the money for medical treatment or to fund research.

Starting in "Squid Game" Season 2, we meet Park Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook), whose daughter has blood cancer. He undoubtedly entered the games to help pay for her medical treatments, and since one of the guards, No-eul (Park Gyu-young), is aware of his daughter, she helps fake his death and escape the island so that his child won't lose a father. Player 246 winds up surviving, so he's one of the two players by the end of "Squid Game" Season 3 who make it out alive. He set out to help his sick child, but in the end, his child actually saved his life.

The winner of the first season of "Beast Games," Jeffrey Allen, has a child with Creatine Transporter Deficiency, which was the reason he competed on the show in the first place: His goal was to win the money to help fund research and hopefully find a cure someday. It's unclear if he received any kind of advantage as it seems as though most people didn't find out about his child until later on in the series, and with so many games coming down to random chance, he could've easily been eliminated at any time. But it's clear that those who got to know Allen (both on the show and in the audience) were rooting for him because of his heartbreaking story. In both cases, a player with noble ambitions succeeds in the end, which is a nice palette cleanser after all the backstabbing.