Squid Game producers came up with 'ingenious solution' to stop contestants second-guessing games
The minds behind Squid Game: The Challenge had quite the difficulty in bringing the iconic Netflix show to life.
A huge part of the jeopardy for Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) and his fellow contestants in the original Squid Game was that they didn't know what they'd be facing next.
When he stands in front of the umbrella symbol he doesn't realise he's picking the toughest task, and when he picks Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) to partner up with in the fourth game it soon dawns on him that either he or the old man won't make it through.
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That's the issue the people making Squid Game: The Challenge had to face, how do you pull the tricks and twists Squid Game is known for when your contestants have watched the show?
It turns out the answer is you throw something at them they weren't expecting.
That's the job of Squid Game: The Challenge, taking 456 people who've watched the show and making them compete for a prize pot of $4.56 million (£3.63 million).
Executive producer Stephen Lambert told LADbible it was tough to be 'making an unscripted version of a scripted show'.
Since the contestants had seen the show and thought they knew what was coming the producers threw in a few curveballs which 'concentrated on moral choices and surprise'.
His fellow executive producer Tim Harcourt said 'it would have been lovely if our cast had never watched Squid Game before', but alas they had to work around that to surprise people.
Executive producer John Hay said getting the 'balance between surprise and familiarity' was one of the toughest tasks in taking a drama show and making it reality.
They revealed that two games in particular stood out as tricky to keep audiences on their toes for, Dalgona (cutting the shape out of honeycomb) and Marbles.
Lambert explained that the twist of these games 'relied on surprise' and anyone who's watched Squid Game knows what they're getting in for.
No one in their right mind would willingly stand in front of the umbrella for that challenge and Lambert told LADbible that when it came to the challenge's surprise they 'had to create new ones'.
We won't spoil exactly how they managed it (watch it for yourself) but their new twist worked like a charm, completely pulling the rug out from under their feet and causing plenty of drama.
Lambert said: "That became a very dramatic thing was a good example of a kind of a surprising twist. So we were trying to surprise the players going into the big games.
"But we were also trying to create games inside the dormitory that would reveal character, which we needed to ensure what happened."
Hay revealed that it actually took them 19 attempts to get the recipe right for Dalgona where they could provide everyone with a fair challenge and make sure they didn't set off anyone's allergies.
He said it resulted in an 'unexpectedly tough game' as that had been the one they thought would be easiest to bring to the real world.
Marbles too was tricky to recreate as everyone who'd watched the show thought they knew what was coming when it was time to pair up.
Harcourt explained: "We knew that some people would really care about the person they were playing marbles with and go, 'Oh, I'm going to be playing Marbles in a minute. Do you know what, I'm going to go and pick my worst enemy over there because I don't really care if he goes'.
"One of our producers came up with an ingenious solution to ensure that people who really, really genuinely had very strong feelings to each other that in some cases predated even the show would be wrong-footed completely and end up having to play Marbles against each other and give that game all its power."
As for what that solution is, you'll just have to watch the show and find out for yourself.
Squid Game: The Challenge is available to watch on Netflix, the first five episodes release on 22 November with four more on 29 November and the season finale on 6 December.
Topics: Netflix, TV and Film
Joe Harker