How The 1988 Seoul Olympics Influenced Squid Game

While the premise of Squid Game is fictional, the hugely popular Netflix series has an underlying connection to the controversies of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, likely inspiring the show’s economic inequality-based death games. Squid Game is Netflix’s grueling South Korean series about hundreds of debt-ridden people who are recruited to play in a series of children’s games for an outstanding cash prize. Eager to win money to pay their debts by winning simple games, Squid Game’s players soon discover the cruel nature of the event, where losing or breaking rules of the games means death. Despite this dystopian premise, however, the series has a strong – if unlikely – link to the real-life 24th olympiad.

Most of Squid Game follows Gi-hun and other core contestants of the games, while another death-defying subplot follows detective Jun-ho trying to get to the bottom of the games. After disguising himself as one of Squid Game’s shape-designated staff members, Jun-ho wanders into a file room where he discovers crucial information on the brutal death games’ past. One file indicates South Korea’s Squid Game events began in 1988, which just so happens to be the year the nation hosted the international Olympics for the first time. The debut year is just the jumping-off point for the Squid Game-Seoul Olympics parallels, with the many real-life historic controversies seeming to correlate to the show’s themes.

The Netflix series is a commentary on the vast socioeconomic inequalities present in capitalist societies as well as a criticism of the capitalist system itself. Squid Game’s sociological metaphor is achieved through high-stakes death games where poor people risk their lives for money to survive, all the while the wealthy throw away millions to bet on the players’ lives and treat them like animals. With Squid Game’s drama revolving around the elaborate and violent staging of games, it’s essentially a high-stakes Olympics organized by the rich for exploiting the poor. In what seems more than a coincidence, the 1988 Seoul Olympics itself was the center of a humanitarian controversy in which the government rounded up thousands of homeless citizens, alcoholics, children, and disabled people and put them in camps so as to falsely perpetuate the idea of South Korea’s economic prosperity. Associated Press reported that at least 500 of the citizens were killed in the camps through mass murder, but suggests the toll was much higher in reality. This suggests clear parallels between both the fictional show and the actual Olympic games.

The 1988 Seoul Olympics was largely an opportunity for the Squid Game‘s South Korea setting to perpetuate the illusions of economic modernization and social mobility while legitimizing the government’s authoritarian militaristic regime. Underneath the nation’s facade to the world during the highly financed and glorified Olympics, socioeconomic inequality reigned deeply, and the rich reaped the benefits of the Olympic games while the poor lost their homes and were thrown aside. According to AP, one official at these camps described the “inmates” as people who “would have died in the streets anyway.” This is eerily similar to the justification of Squid Game’s death games, where the recruiters and organizers believe these people were desperate and would likely die from their poverty or criminal activities regardless.

Squid Game can be seen as an elaborately symbolic commentary on how the glorification of the 1988 Olympics deeply affected the economic inequalities that are still apparent today. It’s possible Netflix’s Squid Game director Hwang Dong-hyuk saw his show’s fictional death games as originating from South Korea’s priority to clear the streets of the poor. In Squid Game, hundreds are rounded up to play games to the death where only one person typically comes out alive and wealthy, which means quickly ridding the nation of the poor while also serving as entertainment for the rich. One reason why the show’s games have been going on for so long could be that the government turns a blind eye, seeing it as a way to get rid of their economic problems without actually enacting helpful policies. Instead of the camps, Squid Game’s history may indicate that the rich had their own sadistic 1988 Olympics by eliminating the poor.

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Jordan Williams
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Jordan Williams is a Movie/TV Feature Senior Staff Writer for Screen Rant. She graduated from the University of Oregon in 2020 with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Media Studies.

Jordan is based in Seattle, Washington and enjoys exploring the natural beauty the PNW has to offer. She runs on coffee and classic movies, taking pride in having watched every film on AFI’s 100 Greatest Films list and every Best Picture Oscar winner.

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