15 Fun Facts About Squid Game Trivia

Who created, wrote and directed Squid Game?

Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote and directed every episode himself. His earlier features included the crime drama Silenced and the historical drama The Fortress.

The script sat in a drawer for roughly a decade before anyone would make it. In which year was it written?

Hwang wrote it in 2009 while struggling with debt of his own, drawing on Japanese survival manga he had been reading in a comic cafe. Netflix only took an interest around 2019.

Hwang spent years trying to sell the story to South Korean producers and actors. What did they keep telling him it was?

Hwang himself worried the storyline was "too difficult to understand and bizarre", and the companies he pitched agreed, calling it too grotesque and unrealistic. He shelved it and made three other films instead.

Netflix originally intended to release the series under a different name. What was it?

Netflix worried the Korean children's game would mean nothing to international viewers and preferred Round 6, which described the format. Hwang pushed for his own title, and its strangeness turned out to be part of the draw.

How many contestants enter the secret contest at the start of the series?

The 456 players are all in serious debt, and the prize pot grows by ₩100 million for each one eliminated.

Squid Game was HoYeon Jung's acting debut. What had her career been up to that point?

Jung had walked runways for Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Fendi and placed runner-up on Korea's Next Top Model in 2013. She taped her Squid Game audition in New York between shoots.

The endless pastel staircases in the players' quarters were modelled on the drawings of which artist?

Production designer Chae Kyoung-sun drew on Escher's four-dimensional stair drawings, Relativity among them, and described the resulting stairways as "a form of bondage for the contestants".

The warren of tunnels linking the arena, the dormitory and the administrative offices was designed to imitate what?

The ant-colony idea runs right through the design: the guards are ranked as workers, soldiers and managers, matching the circle, triangle and square on their masks.

The masked guards wear a circle, a triangle or a square. What does the shape tell you?

Circles are the workers, triangles the soldiers and squares the managers. The three shapes are also the markings of the playing field for the Korean children's game the show is named after.

The players' green tracksuits were modelled on what kind of clothing?

The costume team took the tracksuits from trainingbok, the athletic wear of 1970s Korea. Giving players and guards each a single flat colour was meant to strip away individuality.

How far off the ground was the Glass Stepping Stones set actually built?

The vertigo was added in post-production with chroma key screens. Even so, 1.5 metres was enough to make the cast visibly nervous, which helped the scene. The tug-of-war set really was more than 10 metres up.

The three characters Seong Gi-hun, Cho Sang-woo and Oh Il-nam take their names from what?

Hwang named them after boys he grew up with, including one called Hwang Jun-ho who had an older brother named Hwang In-ho — a pairing the series reuses.

The protagonist's history as a laid-off car worker was drawn from which real South Korean event?

Hwang based Gi-hun's background on the organisers of the 2009 SsangYong Motor strike against mass layoffs, the same year he was writing the script.

How many Primetime Emmy Awards did the first season take home?

Six wins from fourteen nominations, plus a Golden Globe. The nominations included Outstanding Drama Series, a first for a show not in English.

Lee Jung-jae's 2022 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series was historic for what reason?

No non-English-speaking performance had ever taken the category, and Lee was also the first Asian man to win it.