How Squid Game: The Challenge Players Are 'Shot' (Spoiler: It's Not Paintballs)

If you've watched the 2021 South Korean drama series "Squid Game," you probably remember how the opening game of Red Light, Green Light went down. A giant robotic doll sang a little song with her back turned to the players ... and if they so much as twitched when she turned around, they were shot to death. Luckily for literally everyone both playing and watching "Squid Game: The Challenge" — Netflix's reality competition based on the series — the real-life players involved in Red Light, Green Light aren't shot with actual bullets or anything like that. So what happens to let players know that their movement was detected and that they've been eliminated from the challenge?

In an article on Netflix's TUDUM, the streamer gets into the exact details of the ink packets — known as "squibs" — that each player wears as part of their in-game uniform (which is made up of a green tracksuit adorned with the player's number and a white tee, also numbered). The room where the contestants played Red Light, Green Light was fully equipped with motion capture sensors so that players' squibs were set to explode if they moved while the doll was "watching." 

As Episode 1 continues into the second challenge, it's revealed that the squibs are always used to indicate an elimination — because before and during the Dalgona candy game, eliminated contestants also saw their packets explode. Perhaps most disturbingly, players whose squibs burst are required to lay down and "play dead" until the game ends.

According to the TUDUM article, the costume department had a tough job at first because the squibs weren't visibly exploding on the white shirts. Why? It actually came down to how they were being cleaned. "The costume team were washing the T-shirts with a laundry detergent that had too much starch, and it was acting as a blocker," executive producer Tim Harcourt revealed. Luckily, changing to a low-starch alternative was an easy enough fix.

Considering that the players never left the arena until they were eliminated, the costume department's undertaking was pretty enormous. The same article says that the numbers on the tracksuits were detachable so that players who kept progressing could pick up clean clothes as the game continued. "The costume room was almost as big as one of the other soundstages," executive producer John Hay said. "It was a giant operation to sort, prepare, launder, and distribute all of these clothes — everything was on a different scale [compared] to anything that we've ever done before."

The first five episodes of "Squid Game: The Challenge" are available on Netflix now.