GTA 5 community servers are being flooded with Squid Game clones
Red Light, Green Light comes to Los Santos
Squid Game is popping up in another unexpected place: GTA 5.
The runaway success of Netflix hit Squid Game saw the streaming service launch a dedicated line of clothing for the show this week, and it now seems the Korean drama has breached the shores of GTA 5.
That’s in an unofficial capacity, to be clear, but a swathe of player-made maps inspired by Squid Game’s, let’s say, less savoury pursuits have begun popping up in FiveM, the open-source community modification on PC that’s now synonymous with Grand Theft Auto roleplay.
As you might expect, the logistics of recreating Squid Game’s most enticing scenes inside San Andreas means there’s less in the way of the show’s honeycomb challenge, and more of a focus on its opening Red Light/Green Light endeavor – and even then, the degree of sophistication with which they’re implemented varies pretty widely.
Some servers simply have folk lining up across random freeways, for example, with one designated player barking orders into their headset mic, while a row of goons take aim with sub-machine guns across the way.
Others, on the other hand, have modded in everything from the giant, motion-sensor-equipped – and, let’s be honest, downright terrifying – doll as it features in the show, while others have managed to employ the god awful sleeping quarters-meets-prison where Seong Gi-hun et al rest between each death run.
The most interesting server I stumbled upon had me accessing the Game from beneath Legion Square, and had me running the gauntlet across a bridge with invisible missing panels. One missed-step and, well, you can guess where this story is going.
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I’m not sure how it’d work, but I’d love to see the Tug-O-War set-piece replicated in-game, or maybe even a wee game of marbles, who knows what the ever-creative FiveM GTA 5 community has in mind next.
In good news for GTA players, the GTA remastered collection has (finally) been revealed.
Joe Donnelly is a sports editor from Glasgow and former features editor at 12DOVE. A mental health advocate, Joe has written about video games and mental health for The Guardian, New Statesman, VICE, PC Gamer and many more, and believes the interactive nature of video games makes them uniquely placed to educate and inform. His book Checkpoint considers the complex intersections of video games and mental health, and was shortlisted for Scotland's National Book of the Year for non-fiction in 2021. As familiar with the streets of Los Santos as he is the west of Scotland, Joe can often be found living his best and worst lives in GTA Online and its PC role-playing scene.