In September 2021, a Korean survival drama about debt-ridden adults playing lethal versions of children's games became the most-watched show in Netflix history. It reached number one in 94 countries simultaneously. It was watched by 142 million households in its first four weeks. It generated an estimated $900 million in value for Netflix against a production budget of approximately $21 million per episode.
Squid Game was not supposed to work this way. It was a Korean-language show with no major international stars, subtitled for non-Korean audiences, built on a premise that had existed in Korean popular culture for years without achieving global recognition. It succeeded because of what it said, how it said it, and because the algorithmic infrastructure of global streaming had finally matured to the point where a genuinely good show in any language could find every audience that would want it.
The Premise and the Creator
Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote the original script for Squid Game in 2009. He had been developing it for a decade before Netflix picked it up — multiple Korean studios had passed on it because the premise was considered too dark for mainstream Korean television at the time. The 2008 financial crisis had motivated the original concept: Hwang was personally experiencing debt pressure, and the collision of that reality with the Japanese manga survival-game genre produced a show about what extreme economic desperation does to human beings when you strip away the social structures that normally constrain behaviour.
The children's games — Red Light Green Light, the honeycomb shape-cutting game, tug of war, marbles, the glass bridge, squid game itself — were chosen deliberately. They are games that Korean adults of a certain generation played in childhood, which means the audience watching people die playing them experiences a specific dissonance: the nostalgic and the horrific occupying the same visual space simultaneously. For international audiences, the games were simple enough to understand immediately, making the horror of their lethal stakes accessible without requiring cultural context.
The class critique embedded in the premise was not subtle. The players are all in debt. The organisers are wealthy people who watch for entertainment. The prize money is the sum total of all the players' debts combined — the game is literally powered by the desperation it claims to offer escape from. By 2021, a global pandemic and housing crisis had supplemented the 2008 context. The show arrived at exactly the moment its themes were most legible to the widest possible audience.
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The Netflix Algorithm and the New Rules of Global Hits
Before Squid Game, the conventional wisdom was that genuinely global hits required English-language production. Netflix’s recommendation algorithm does not weight content by language — it weights by what users actually watch. When Squid Game launched and Korean viewers started watching at high completion rates, the algorithm registered a quality signal and delivered it to similar viewers in other markets. Those viewers watched, completed, and recommended it socially. Within two weeks, it was the most-talked-about show in the world.
The lesson was significant: the barrier to global success for non-English content was not linguistic or cultural. It was infrastructural. Once the infrastructure existed to deliver the right content to the right audience regardless of language, what would succeed was simply whatever was best at what it was trying to do. Squid Game was extremely good at what it was trying to do.
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Korean Soft Power — The Wave That Was Already Coming
Squid Game did not emerge in isolation. It was the largest single wave in a tide of Korean cultural export building for two decades. The Korean Wave — Hallyu — began with Korean TV dramas exported to Southeast Asia in the late 1990s, expanded through the 2010s with K-pop’s global penetration (BTS, BLACKPINK), and achieved mainstream Western recognition when Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020.
South Korea invested systematically in cultural export since the 1990s, recognising soft power as a strategic asset. The Korean Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) funds and supports Korean entertainment industries with no direct equivalent in most Western countries. The investment produced measurable returns: Korean cultural exports generate billions annually and made South Korea one of the most culturally influential countries in the world relative to its size. Squid Game was the moment this infrastructure became visible to a global audience that had not previously been tracking it.
The Economic Allegory — Why It Resonated Everywhere
The most consistent observation from critics and academics was that Squid Game’s economic allegory translated across cultural contexts with unusual precision. The specific details were Korean, but the underlying structure was recognisable almost everywhere.
The show’s central argument: capitalism taken to its logical extreme produces a situation indistinguishable from the game — a system in which desperate people compete against each other for resources while those who designed the system watch from a comfortable distance, and in which the rules appear fair while the conditions that brought people to the game were anything but equal. Hwang has been explicit about this in interviews.
In a world where housing affordability, student debt, and generational wealth inequality had become dominant political concerns across multiple economies simultaneously, a show about people gambling their lives because they have no other options did not feel like dystopian fantasy. It felt like heightened realism.
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The Cultural Aftermath
The immediate aftermath was measurable in ways streaming shows rarely produce. The green tracksuits became one of the most popular Halloween costumes of 2021 globally. The Red Light Green Light doll became a recognisable image internationally. “Squid Game” entered vocabulary as shorthand for high-stakes competitive desperation.
The longer-term aftermath was structural. Netflix and other platforms accelerated investment in non-English content. Korean drama production budgets increased. International co-productions involving Korean creative teams became more common. The Academy expanded eligibility rules to make it easier for non-English content to compete in mainstream categories.
Squid Game Season 2, released in December 2024, performed strongly by every objective metric. Some critics found it less surprising than the original — which was structurally inevitable. A show cannot surprise an audience already waiting for it.
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Wear the Game
The Squid-ing Game Streetwear Back Print T-shirt (India) and (International) — for those who understood what the game was really about before the credits rolled. Browse the full Pop Culture Collection at Xavi’s World.
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