In 2025, the world is full of entrepreneurs who made their fortunes on early YouTube, as well as amusement parks that increasingly resemble dystopian Squid Game-like scenarios. The two meet at Beast Land, the park founded by MrBeast — the world’s most-followed YouTuber, with over 400 million subscribers — the man who popularized (if not invented) the “impossible challenges” format and the idea of rewarding his followers by pushing them to perform extreme acts.
MrBeast, whose real name is James Stephen Donaldson, born in 1998 in North Carolina, has released a series of renderings of his new amusement park in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: a hybrid between a training camp, a reality show arena, a digital platform, and a perpetual render.

The park, named Beast Land, will officially open on November 13 in the Hittin district, north of the capital — an entertainment and mixed-events cluster that also includes another amusement park, Boulevard World, and the Kingdom Arena stadium. It will remain open until December 31, 2025, as part of Riyadh Season 2025, the sixth edition of the cultural festival promoted by Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, which divides the capital into eleven entertainment zones dedicated to digital art, culture, world sports championships, and dining.

Plenty of data is already available on the project — which is practically completed: the park will cover an area of 60,000 square meters and include more than 27 attractions and games, 40 restaurants and shops, as well as interactive experiences, all inspired by MrBeast’s challenge videos.
There are no precise figures yet on the cost, but to get a sense of scale, consider that this year’s entire Riyadh festival is valued at around $3.2 billion.

This is not the first major development in this part of Saudi Arabia; on the contrary, with each new “public” project, Riyadh increasingly becomes a place where reality and fiction are one and the same. The process extends beyond the capital, reaching Neom — the new artificial city built from scratch in the northwestern Saudi desert, conceived as a laboratory for futuristic, renewable-energy-powered constructions.

Among these is The Line, the most iconic: a linear city stretching 170 kilometers, enclosed between two mirrored walls, designed to host nine million people in an environment with no cars or streets. And still within Neom, even a stadium has been designed to hang suspended atop a skyscraper. This represents a new kind of tourism: unreal, gamified, detached from local landscapes and functional architecture, yet increasingly aligned with the idea that every place can be rebuilt to serve the needs of the entertainment industry.

And those needs today are clear: you go to Beast Land to be pushed to your limits — squeezed, watched, exhausted, and monitored. There are reinterpretations of popular challenges such as The Floor is Lava, where the ground literally disappears beneath your feet, and endurance contests like Last One Standing, along with mazes and hyperrealistic architectures. Everything is designed to make visitors physically experience the extreme, obsessive logic of MrBeast’s all-American videos — with a touch of Korean dystopia and a hint of Disney Syndrome for the ultra-rich.

All images: Courtesy Beast Land