Squid Game Trivia Quiz: Green Tracksuits and Dalgona Tins

Trivia Quizzes TV Shows

Seong Gi-hun is a laid-off car plant worker turned chauffeur, living in a working class district of Seoul with a gambling habit, an ex-wife preparing to move his daughter abroad, and loan sharks who want his signature on a body consent form. A stranger in a good suit finds him on a subway platform and offers cash to play ddakji, a children's game played with folded paper tiles, one slap across the face for every loss. Gi-hun takes the bruises, the money and the business card. What follows is a van, sleeping gas, and a dormitory holding 456 people in roughly the same financial condition, each issued a green tracksuit with a number stitched onto it. Gi-hun is 456. Above the bunks hangs a glass bank that fills a little further with every death, and the figure written on its side is 45.6 billion won.

Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote the first version of the script around 2009, during a stretch when his own finances had collapsed, then spent close to a decade being told by Korean studios and investors that the premise was too cruel and too odd to fund. Netflix commissioned it years later, by which point audiences had absorbed enough stories about household debt for the idea to read as commentary rather than shock. Hwang wrote and directed all nine episodes himself and said afterwards that the strain of the production cost him several teeth. The rounds were staged on enormous practical sets rather than assembled digitally, including the dirt field for the opening game and the pastel staircase linking dormitory to arenas.

The games are drawn from playground rules that most Korean adults learned before they were ten. Red Light, Green Light opens the competition, called out by a motion tracking doll that towers over the field. The second round hands each player a tin of dalgona, the sugar and baking soda candy sold outside schools, with a shape pressed into the surface that has to be cut free without cracking. Tug of war comes third, fought in teams of ten on a raised platform. Marbles follows, played in pairs, which forces the survivors to choose an opponent from among the people they have been sleeping beside. Then comes a bridge of paired glass panels, one sheet tempered and one ordinary, crossed in a fixed order under a countdown. The last round is the squid game itself, a playground contest fought on a court shaped like the animal and scratched into the dirt.

Lee Jung-jae plays Gi-hun. Park Hae-soo plays Cho Sang-woo, the investment manager and childhood friend who left the same neighbourhood for Seoul National University and reached the island wanted for financial crimes. Jung Ho-yeon, a runway model with no screen credits before this, plays the North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok. The series reached Netflix in September 2021 and became the platform's most watched title within weeks. At the Emmy Awards the following September it took several prizes, among them lead actor for Lee and directing for Hwang, the first wins of their kind for a drama in a language other than English.

Above all of it sit the VIPs, masked financiers flown in to bet on the late rounds from a lounge furnished with people, and the Front Man who runs the island on their behalf. Their presence turns the central bargain into something colder than a game. Every player signed a consent form, every vote to continue was taken by majority, and the organisers keep pointing at that paperwork as proof of fairness. Every answer is listed once the quiz is finished.