How Squid Game: Unleashed’s Team Turned Its Dark Source Material Into Skill-based Thrills

Boss Fight and Netflix Games debuted Squid Game: Unleashed at Gamescom 2024, and the team behind the 32-player battle-meets-party game reemerged at The Game Awards 2024 to announce that the game will be free to everyone — even if you don’t have a Netflix subscription. The game arrives on Dec. 17 (Squid Game season 2 premieres Dec. 26). Earlier this week, Polygon sat down with game director Bill Jackson to talk about Unleashed and the process of adapting Squid Game into a video game that leans on the dark humor of the original show, but hopefully adds more fun into the equation than the characters on the TV show could ever hope to have.

For one thing, the Squid Game TV show characters never know how the games work before they start playing. They’re just thrown into a deadly situation and have to figure out how to survive as they go along, often with several casualties involved in the process. In video game form, Jackson emphasizes, players will be able to face these challenges over and over and therefore have the opportunity to get better at them each time — and even compete to climb the leaderboards. “In that world where everybody’s playing, you actually can get better and move up through a ladder, and get a next league, and move up to better competition,” Jackson told me on our video call this week. “Or you can be a casual player and just kind of hang out and not worry about that. And it’s really up to you. So it is still for everyone.”

Of course, that “everyone” doesn’t mean this game is family-friendly — this is Squid Game, after all, so it’s got gore. But the video game also has a somewhat cartoonish aesthetic to help ease that aspect (which is yet another reason it’s a less harrowing experience than the show). “You don’t want to create a world where players don’t want to be,” Jackson said. “You want a place where they want to be. So that started to lean us towards a more stylistic art style. And yes, we did have some earlier darker versions of that art style that were nixed as we worked through the problem.”

When it comes to depicting “the brutality of the world” of Squid Game, Jackson went on, “There are moments in this game where you can be thrown through the air in a fairly graphic way, and if your character hits the wall, there might be a blood splatter on the wall.” But the game’s physics are still going to feel good, he assured me, because this is a skill-based game as well: “We wanted the control to be a little bit more accurate instead of feeling what we used to call ‘floaty.’ We wanted you to be able to have a little more direct control over the character. […] We didn’t want the characters to feel unreal and have their physics feel unreal, so it feels accurate to that. It’s a fun, more accurate game than kind of the floaty ball or capsule shapes that you’re probably used to in the genre.”

Unleashed will include deadly schoolyard games from the first season of Squid Game; some of these games will be very familiar to any players who’ve seen the show, while others had to be adapted to fit the video game format. For example, the game Dalgona — also known as the honeycomb game, in which Squid Game characters have to carve out a specifically shaped piece of candy — takes on a different form in Squid Game: Unleashed. “What we do is, we inspire a level by that one,” said Jackson. “And with Dalgona, you’re kind of skating the shape out on a level. And then you fall through. It’s cool.

“So it’s inspired by [Squid Game] sometimes, or it’s direct in some cases. And then there are completely new ones that are either inspired by something else, or really childhood experiences,” Jackson continued. “They’re basically the juxtaposition of a childhood experience that maybe we’ve all had around the world, coupled with this kind of brutal penalty for messing up.”

As for Squid Game season 2, Jackson and his team have also created levels based on the games that will be introduced there — but players don’t need to worry about spoilers. Unleashed won’t be releasing that content until later on, Jackson assured me: “A week after season 2 goes live on the series side, there’s going to be season 2 games in our game.”

That’s all possible because the game developers have been able to be in direct communication with the Squid Game team over the course of this process. “The great thing is we have incredible collaboration and access to that stuff,” said Jackson. “So when we see the script, even, we can say back, ‘These work,’ like I mentioned, ‘These are direct, easy to do.’ ‘This one, we can’t figure out how to do,’ or ‘We have to inspire something from it.’ And that conversation happens at that level. […] We’re collaborating with the actual creators and with the marketing team to understand how all this will fit together when we finally get to launch it in our game. But we’re not going to spoil anything. It will not happen until season 2 has been revealed to the world.”