‘Squid Game’: There Were Secret Clues Hidden in Plain Sight
Netflix’s Squid Game has become the streaming platform’s most successful original Korean drama. K-drama fans and casual viewers have found themselves binge-watching all nine episodes and left shocked by its brutality and story of bloody survival. Squid Game’s success even led Co-CEO of Netflix Ted Sarandos to foresee the drama being the platform’s biggest success ever.
Four hundred fifty-six players participate in a ruthless game that turns childhood games into a bloodbath for survival with a grand prize. Fans of the drama soon realized there were clues hidden in plain sight all along. The clues include foreshadowing what games the players would participate in and the grand twist revealed at the end of the drama. While Netflix’s Squid Game enthralled viewers with its horrific story of greed and inhumanity, they overlooked what was right in front of their faces.
[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers about Squid Game.]
Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ has 456 players take part in 6 days of deadly games
The whole premise for Squid Game was Seong Gi-Hun (Lee Jung-Jae), and 455 players took part in a secretive game to win billions in cash prize. The players sign their lives away and learn the games in question are the ones they played during childhood. It seems simple until it is not. The games are changed to have deadly consequences that result in the player count dwindling and increasing the cash prize. There is one disadvantage to the players.
In the Netflix K-drama, the players are unaware of what game they will play until the day of. They have no time to strategize or find the best way to win to ensure they stay alive. One player is in cahoots with some of the guards and is given information in exchange for his services as a doctor. Squid Game viewers soon realized the players could have known about the games if they looked closely behind their bunk beds.
Graphics of the games were displayed on the wall where the players slept
According to Bustle, a Squid Game fan noticed major easter eggs to the games and a clue that could have affected Gi-Hun’s storyline. The room where the 456 players sleep and reside during the games is stacked with metal bunk beds. Behind the bunk beds was the answer to what games the players would play throughout the six days in captivity. A TikTok user noticed graphics on the walls behind the beds. The user soon theorized the graphics had a meaning, and it was proven true as more players were killed and beds were removed.
The walls were the answer to the player’s worry of not knowing what game they would pay ahead of time. The white walls had illustrations of each game they played. They were only visible as more and more players were brutally killed with each game. The same fan who discovered the easter egg had another theory about the show.
A well-dressed man approaches Gi-Hun at the train station in the first episode of the drama. The man gives Gi-Hun a choice between the red player and the blue player. Gi-Hun chooses blue and later loses the game. The fan noticed Gi-Hun’s choice to be the blue payer also parallels him being a player in the game. If Gi-Hun had chosen red, would he have been a guard instead? The guards wore bright red jumpsuits while the players wore green tracksuits.
Clues in ‘Squid Game’ pointed out Oh Il-Nam’s twist ending
Fans give director Hwang Dong-Hyuk praise for developing a complex storyline that took him 10 years to create. Squid Game had fans tearing over the only elderly character, Oh Il-Nam (Oh Young-Soo). Il-Nam is dying of cancer and enters the game to win money for surgery and has nothing else to lose. Gi-Hun becomes his protector and stays by his side until the end.
In the Netflix K-drama, Il-Nam and Gi-Hun have to play a game of marbles to declare the winner. Il-Nam sacrifices his last marble to save Gi-Hun. Fans shed tears over his unfortunate end. But the K-drama has a twist ending. Il-Nam never dies and is one of the founders of the game who wanted to have some fun for a change. According to Screen Rant, clues of Il-Nam being the founder were there from the start.
Il-Nam wears a jumpsuit with #001. During “Red Light, Green Light,” the robotic doll does not detect Il-Nam as a player. In the Dalgona game, Il-Nam correctly chooses the star and wins the game. When a fight breaks out in the dormitory, Il-Nam shouts for the guards to interfere, and they do so immediately. Further clues include his name translating to “First Man,” and he has no player profile. To top it off, the Game perfectly reconstructed his neighborhood in the marble game where he supposedly loses.
