MrBeast, the American YouTuber known for his large-scale challenges and stunts, has launched the Beast Land theme park as part of Riyadh Season 2025 in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, with attendees competing for prizes worth over $533,000.
The latest edition of Riyadh Season, described as one of the world’s largest entertainment festivals, features a lineup of various experiences across 11 main zones. The theme park from MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, features a mix of thrill rides and immersive experiences inspired by the YouTuber’s content, which tends to entail elaborate endurance tests and big cash prizes.
The new attraction brings MrBeast’s “viral challenges and interactive games into real-life experiences for the first time, offering fans immersive and high-energy challenges plus huge prizes,” according to a press release on the event.
Available through December 27, the park offers a range of live shows, music festivals, sporting events, culinary and fashion experiences, as well as performances from artists around the world. The featured challenges include the Tower Siege, Battle Bridge, Beast Summit, Lights Out, Drop Zone, Air Mail, Maze Run, Revolution, and the Warrior Challenge.
Participants can compete across a variety of games, collecting points daily to qualify for cash prizes. At the end of each day, the top three participants with the highest scores receive daily cash rewards, while the grand prize goes to the participant with the highest overall score across the entire duration of the Beast Land event.
The latest launch comes after the 26th session of the United Nations Tourism General Assembly, which was held in Riyadh and concluded earlier this week with the adoption of the “Riyadh Declaration on the Future of Tourism.”
The declaration aims to offer “a shared road map to guide the sector’s next half-century around sustainability, inclusion and AI-powered innovation,” Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Tourism said in a statement Tuesday.
Saudi Arabia has been seeking to shed its reputation as an austere and conservative Islamic state under modernizing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He has been keen to promote tourism to try to diversify away from reliance on oil exports. But Western countries have continued to accuse Saudi Arabia of human rights abuses.
In September, Human Rights Watch accused the Saudi government of using the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which featured a range of famed comedians from Dave Chappelle to Pete Davidson, to “deflect attention” from the country’s “repression of free speech and other pervasive human rights violations.”
The comedy festival took place over the seventh anniversary of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “Everyone performing in Riyadh should use this high-profile opportunity to call for the release of detained Saudi activists,” Joey Shea, a Saudi Arabia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in September.
Newsweek has contacted Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Tourism for comment via email.
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