Squid Game: The Challenge - Red Light, Green Light Rules Explained

If you ever played Red Light, Green Light as a kid, you probably know the basic rules of the game. One person runs the whole ordeal and turns their back, allowing the rest of the participants to sneak up on that person ... until they turn around and catch the players by surprise. If they don't freeze on the spot, they either have to go back to the beginning or they don't get to play anymore.

In 2021's South Korea drama series "Squid Game," this game takes on a totally new vibe when a group of unsuspecting and financially devastated people gather to play the game versus a giant, eerie robot. That new vibe? If you don't freeze immediately, you get shot and killed. (Nobody said the vibe was fun — just that it was new.) Considering that this is the very first game in a competition where people fight to the death in order to score a truly enormous cash prize, no one understands at first that this version of Red Light, Green Light is actually lethal, adding another level of terror to the proceedings.

Now, in Netflix's reality series based on the drama — "Squid Game: The Challenge" — participants also kick off the game with Red Light, Green Light. Nobody dies this time, though.

Unlike the poor unfortunate (fictional) souls in "Squid Game," the contestants on "Squid Game: The Challenge" knew exactly what they were getting into when they signed up for the reality series. This is to say that, as they entered the enormous room where they filmed this particular game — a filming process that was overwhelmingly described as torturous by contestants — they knew what the game would be, because they, like a lot of other people, had already seen "Squid Game." That didn't mean a lot of them were very good at the game, though.

"Squid Game: The Challenge" kicked off its first episode with a whopping 456 contestants (to match the $4.56 million cash prize), but after Red Light, Green Light, that number is seriously diminished. See, if you so much as twitch when the giant creepy robot girl stops singing her weird little song and turns around, a squib on your chest explodes, indicating that you've been "shot" and are officially out of the game. After the game concludes, the players who managed to cross the finish line are told that 259 players were eliminated in that first game, leaving 197 contestants standing.

"Squid Game: The Challenge" is available to stream on Netflix now.