Squid Game has quickly become one of Netflix's most talked-about shows of recent times and the Battle Royale-esque Korean thriller became a huge success almost overnight on the streaming platform.
However, its rise to popularity hasn't been quite as instantaneous as you might think.
Speaking to The Korea Times, the show's director Hwang Dong-hyuk recently revealed he wrote the script for Squid Game way back in 2008 and spent over a decade struggling to find funding for it.
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"After about 12 years, the world has changed into a place where such peculiar, violent survival stories are actually welcomed," he said.
Netflix eventually came on board in 2019 with the show being given the green light in the same year... And maybe it was the change of title that did it!
Originally Dong-hyuk wanted to call it Round Six which sounds exactly like the sort of early 00s, straight-to-DVD gimmicky thriller that could have been in the wrong hands.
If you haven't somehow binged through it all already yet, the show sees 456 people of various disrepute invited to play a series of high-stakes games based around Korean children's games.
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Many of the competitors are gambling addicts or other members of society who've managed to run up huge debt problems and the games are posited as a chance for them to turn their fortunes around and take home 45.6 billion won (roughly around £28.2 million).
However, should those competitors fail to complete each game, it's more than the competition they find themselves eliminated from as they get brutally murdered if they are 'eliminated'.
Squid Game has become the first-ever Korean series to land at number one on Netflix, and its success has been such that South Korean broadband provider SK Broadband is reportedly suing the streaming giant due to an outage that they claim was caused by a surge of people trying to watch the show.
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In a statement to CNBC, a Netflix spokesperson said: "We will review the claim that SK Broadband has filed against us. In the meantime, we continue to seek open dialogue and explore ways of working with SK Broadband in order to ensure a seamless streaming experience for our shared customers."
There have been other issues around the show too. For instance, a woman who is fluent in both English and Korean has claimed the English subtitles in Netflix's Squid Game are terrible and haven't "preserved the amazing dialogue".
Comedian and writer Youngmi Mayer wrote on Twitter: "If you don't understand Korean you didn't really watch the same show. Translation was so bad. The dialogue was written so well and zero of it was preserved.
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"The reason this happens is because translation work is not respected and also the sheer volume of content. translators are underpaid and overworked and it's not their fault.
"It's the fault of producers who don't appreciate the art."
Nonetheless, this hasn't stopped the show's incredible rise.
Featured Image Credit: Netflix