How “Squid Game: The Challenge” brought Red Light, Green Light to life

Sydney Bucksbaum
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Executive producers John Hay, Toni Ireland, and Stephen Yemoh detail exactly how the first game was designed for the 456 players.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Squid Game: The Challenge episode 1, "Red Light, Green Light."

Four hundred fifty-six players walked into Squid Game: The Challenge hoping win the $4.56 million cash prize, but more than half were cut almost immediately during Red Light, Green Light.

Squid Game's most iconic challenge was brought to life on the reality show exactly as it looked in Netflix's buzzy Korean drama — and it played out exactly the same, too. Four hundred fifty-six players have five minutes to cross the finish line, and they can only run/walk when the giant robot doll is singing. When the singing stops, they must freeze, and anyone who moves is eliminated as the ink pack hidden under their shirt explodes (thankfully, no one actually dies in the real-life version). By the end of the five minutes, only 197 players successfully make it, meaning 259 people are eliminated from the competition immediately.

<p>Courtesy of Netflix</p> Red Light Green Light on 'Squid Game: The Challenge'

Courtesy of Netflix

Red Light Green Light on 'Squid Game: The Challenge'

Despite its seemingly simple rules/design, it actually took a lot behind the scenes to make the first game work as fairly as possible, according to executive producers John Hay, Toni Ireland, and Stephen Yemoh.

"It's quite a difficult game — there was no deliberate intention to make it more difficult," Hay tells EW. "What we had to do was just figure out the enormous logistics of getting 456 people to play that game. All credit to the production team. It was an enormous feat to pull that off."

The first issue? Finding a location big enough to create the indoor "playground" field that players have to cross under threat of the giant robot doll. "We ended up shooting in the biggest indoor space in Europe, an incredible former airship hanger just north of London," Hay says.

Once the location was set, the most important step in the process was figuring out how to fairly judge all 456 players.

"With that amount of prize money at stake, you have to be beyond reproach that you have checked and double checked and got all the right protocols in place to make sure you are beyond any doubt about who has moved when the doll's head is turned," Hay says. "There's a whole system of independent adjudicators from a company other than ours who were trained lawyers who were watching the footage and then making sure they knew when people had moved and hadn't moved. It was a longer and slower process than it would be just if you were just calling it and shooting people, but it was quite a feat to pull off. It was tough."

<p>Courtesy of Netflix</p> Players during the Red Light Green Light game

Courtesy of Netflix

Players during the Red Light Green Light game

It wasn't solely up to the human judges, however. Ireland reveals they also used motion sensing technology as well.

"We had the cameras that monitored the movement, and each of the players wore a tracker in their left shoulder that helped us find them on the field of play effectively so we could get a camera shot of the play," Ireland says. "We knew we had the information from our adjudicators who'd moved, therefore we had to find them on this enormous field of play, so they had trackers so we could find them and we knew what camera was closest, then we could get a closeup of them as we knew we were going to detonate the squib. That was actually a really important part of our process of how we filmed the game."

Yemoh adds that they had entire teams operating the cameras that were filming the players as well as the ones tracking movement, all to get the fairest outcome. "And those were separate — we had cameras that were filming the game, and separate cameras that were just concentrating on the movement of the players," he says. "It was quite a complicated process."

New episodes of Squid Game: The Challenge premiere Wednesdays on Netflix.

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