Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson, one of YouTube's most-watched creators, is taking his high-stakes viral challenges offline. He just opened an $85 million temporary theme park in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and it's exactly what you'd expect from someone who built a career on making people compete for absurd prizes.
Called "Beast Land," the park opened on November 13 and promises to turn everyday visitors into contestants. Instead of traditional roller coasters and lazy rivers, you get competition zones where you can launch projectiles from catapults, avoid trap doors, and race through mazes—all for points that translate to actual prizes.
In a series of posts to his 33.4 million followers on X this week, Donaldson explained his approach. "I didn't want this to be like a typical theme park," he wrote. "Thought of things from first principles and created games I would love to play!"
That "first principles" thinking—breaking problems down to their basics instead of copying what everyone else does—is classic MrBeast. It's how he's reinvented everything from YouTube content to, apparently, roller coasters.
What's Actually Inside Beast Land
The centerpiece is something called the "Beast Arena," a competition zone featuring original games designed to mirror the challenges from his viral videos. Donaldson revealed several with concept art:
- Tower Siege: Participants load balls into real catapults and aim for giant 60-foot tubes to rack up points.
- Drop Zone: Six players stand on trap doors, and the last person to press a light-up button gets dropped in an elimination-style game.
- Dungeon Escape: A timed race through a maze where the fastest participants earn the most points.
These games and others feed into what Donaldson calls the "world's largest prize wall," where accumulated points can be exchanged for rewards.
Beast Land runs through December 27 and offers tiered experiences. General admission costs $6.67 and lets you watch the chaos unfold. But if you want to actually compete in official challenges for prizes, you'll need the $66 "Beast Mode+" ticket.
Why Riyadh?
When people questioned the Saudi Arabia location on Twitter, Donaldson had an answer ready. "Middle of the world because a majority of my audience is outside America and we have a big Middle Eastern fan base. Wanted to give them a chance to participate!" he wrote.
A community note on that tweet pointed out that MrBeast had signed a deal with Saudi-funded Riyadh Season earlier this year, making Beast Land part of that larger entertainment event.
The Bigger Picture
Beast Land is just the latest expansion in Donaldson's relentless empire-building. In October, MrBeast filed a trademark application for "MrBeast Financial," a proposed cryptocurrency exchange and payment service. Whether that materializes or not, it's clear he's thinking well beyond YouTube ad revenue.
The park itself is temporary, but the experiment is worth watching. Can a YouTube star translate viral video energy into physical experiences that people will actually pay for? We'll know more by December 27.
