MrBeast’s ‘Beast Games: An Annoying YouTuber Gets a Game Show, What Fun

So much of the internet nowadays feels like that scene from Matilda when she’s forced to watch Million Dollar Sticky, the inane game show where contestants are painted with glue and locked inside a chamber full of money, trying to catch as many dollar bills as they can with their gooey bodies. Logging on to TikTok, where users are encouraged to hawk items from the TikTok Shop, or Instagram, where lifestyle influencers post stories full of affiliate links, or Twitter/X, where people post rage-bait threads in an attempt to juice the website’s algorithms exposes the self-promoting, capital-worshipping reality of essentially every social digital space that currently exists.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of YouTube phenomenon MrBeast, who has finally converted his click-bait empire into Prime Video’s outrageous new game show Beast Games. It was only a matter of time.

I am not overly familiar with the oeuvre of MrBeast (né Jimmy Donaldson), aside from occasional glimpses of YouTube thumbnails featuring his artificially whitened smile next to captions such as “Train Vs Giant Pit” and “I Survived 50 Hours In Antarctica.” His account is one of many that has distilled the art of clickable content into a science whose success is easily replicable thanks to curiosity-piquing presentation and steady viewership from over 300 million subscribers, many of whom contribute to the outrageous sums of money featured in semi-regular giveaway stunts. Is it any good? Not really. Most of it isn’t even that interesting. This is the same audience that turned “Skibidi Toilet” into a viral phenomenon, so there’s no accounting for taste.

Taste, admittedly, is the last thing on the minds of MrBeast and his co-conspirators—sorry, co-hosts—who once made “$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life,” based on the hit Netflix series that used the dystopian concept of a deadly game show to critique both modern capitalist selfishness and our drive to turn violence into entertainment. Beast Games is not so deadly (though it has already been slapped with a lawsuit from contestants alleging dangerous and unhealthy conditions on set), so it ups the ante in other ways. The show promises, among other prizes, a winning pot of $5 million, the largest cash prize in television game-show history. For those who find uncanny-valley video thumbnails of absurd scenarios impossible to resist, this is must-see entertainment.

One thousand contestants kick off the first episode of Beast Games, each hoping to be the lucky winner of the big $5 million, as well as other enviable prizes like a Lamborghini and a private island. If these seem like prizes a 10-year-old might think up, that’s part of the appeal. Beast Games seems to have two things going for it: challenges that are very simple in structure, like stacking a bunch of foam blocks on top of another or catching balls dropped through a ceiling full of holes; and scenarios that can only be explained through hyperbolic language. MrBeast himself, who acts as host, is constantly describing events as “This is the first show ever to do X,” “This is the biggest-ever amount of Y,” “This is the most people who have ever done Z all at once.” You mustn’t turn away, lest you miss the latest broken record.

This all lends itself to the show’s extremely heightened environment. Producers strolling around with cameras eke out high drama from the people gathered for each of MrBeast’s various tests. Half of the contestants are there hoping to win money for family members caught in dire circumstances. One man in the first episode declares, “I will die for this. I will die for 5 million dollars.” People are constantly crying. The tears reach a crescendo every time a test involves some measure of personal sacrifice, such as an early challenge that forces a few contestants to choose to eliminate themselves to allow everyone else to continue, or another where contestants can take a bribe, thereby eliminating an entire group.

MrBeast chimes in during these moments with insightful observations like this: “Sometimes the people who you think you can trust the most are actually the people you can trust the least.” The phrase “trolley problem” bounced around in my head so much that when the show finally teased a real-life version of this exact thought experiment I thought I must be hallucinating.

There is entertainment value in all of this, even if it’s the kind of entertainment that makes you feel kind of grimy while watching it. The Beast Games crew has built an entire “city” where contestants will reside for the remainder of the show, complete with bike paths and a Feastables kiosk. Many of the challenges aren’t that dissimilar from those you might see on Survivor or Wipeout. Most of them have darker psychological elements that force contestants to test the limits of their own selfishness, often turning the show into what feels like a high-stakes social experiment (another genre of video that online people tend to love). “They literally look like ants,” MrBeast comments, watching his victims assemble in the town square of his artificial city.

That’s right, little ants. Keep performing your tricks for us and maybe you’ll get an extra chocolate bar in your Lunchly. Or you’ll be dropped through a trapdoor down a bottomless chute, screaming. Either way, we’ll be watching.