Beast Games Winner Shares Heartwarming Use for $10 Million Prize (Exclusive)

• Jeffrey Allen took home a record-breaking $10 million in prize money after winning the first season of Beast Games.
• The reality competition show was inspired by Squid Game and created with YouTuber MrBeast.
• Allen is using his prize money to help fund research for his son’s rare disease, creatine transmitter deficiency.

The winner of the first-ever Beast Games was doing it for more than just the prize money.

Before applying to the show, Jeffrey Allen started watching MrBeast YouTube videos with his son, Jack. The 9-year-old introduced his father to the videos that have already attracted 367 million subscribers on YouTube. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has been pulling viewers into his channel for years with titles that tease reality show-like experiences and large sums of prize money.

So when Allen saw a casting advertisement for Beast Games, the Prime Video reality competition series inspired by Netflix’s Squid Game, he tells PEOPLE he knew it was going to be a big deal: “It’s MrBeast, it’s got to be huge.”

And huge it was. At the start of the competition, 2,000 competitors flocked to Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas to compete on the reality show, with only half of these competitors making it to the official Prime Video show.

“I applied for it, but I didn’t really tell anybody until I knew I got in,” Allen continues. “So it was a secret I kept…  I don’t wanna get anybody’s hopes up and I don’t want my wife to start planning what life’s gonna be like with me gone for a handful of weeks. So I waited until I actually got in before I told them.”

When Beast Games was first announced, there was plenty of anticipation around its eventual premiere — especially with the record-breaking prize pool on the line. However, six months before the show’s premiere, allegations of unsafe filming conditions and “chronic mistreatment” arose, with some of the eliminated contestants filing a lawsuit against Donadlson’s production company and Amazon.

Despite the lawsuit, Allen claims he didn’t share that same experience, stating, “My experience with MrBeast, the Beast team and then Amazon were second to none.”

“The way I look at it is if you’re gonna go out and compete for $5 million, it’s not gonna be easy. But the conditions were more than adequate for me and my friends,” Allen continues. “Honestly, I didn’t know what’s real and what’s not… I didn’t give a ton of a ton of thought to it, but I was just hoping that it didn’t honestly hurt MrBeast or Amazon or the production because I had such a great time.”

As a father of two sons, Allen had much more than the prize money on his mind when he decided to apply. Though he knew competing on the show would be an opportunity to let Jack “see his dad do something super cool,” he also applied hoping to use the experience as an opportunity to raise awareness for his younger son’s rare disease.

Allen’s youngest son Lucas, 7, was diagnosed with Creatine Transporter Deficiency at just 2 years old. CTD is described as “inborn errors of creatine metabolism which interrupt the formation or transport of creatine,” according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders.

“He was missing milestones, especially compared to his older brother,” Allen says of his son’s diagnosis. “He wasn’t able to sit up the same way his older brother was. He wasn’t able to crawl as fluidly and even the way he would eat was different.” 

Allen describes the period before they knew what was wrong as an “18-month diagnosis odyssey.”

“We strapped him up to dozens of machines, did a bunch of tests, and until almost a year and a half later, we were coming up short. There was no answers. No specialists knew what was going on, and we finally got diagnosed through an MRS,” Allen recounts.

Unfortunately, as CTD is particularly rare, there is currently no official treatment or cure for Lucas’ condition. “Our pediatrician had no clue. The specialist had no clue. And even once we were diagnosed, the geneticist to serve us from a premier academic institution had never seen a patient with his condition,” Allen says.

At the time of his application, the prize money for the first season of Beast Games was advertised to be $5 million — the most amount of money to be awarded through a reality competition to date. It wasn’t until there were only six competitors left that the stakes were upped.

“[Donaldson] wheeled out another pyramid of $5 million and says, ‘If you want, someone can grab this coin and flip a coin. And if you call it right, everybody will compete for 10 million. If you don’t, you’re eliminated and you get to compete for 5 million,’“ Allen recalls. “My friend Gage — number 974 who’s an absolute, amazing man — grabbed that coin, flipped it, called it right and we all competed for $10 million.”

For Allen, the “ultimate goal” was to take home the prize money to help his son. “I need to take care of him,” he says. “I want to make sure he’s taken care of at home, but also, can we invest into research to help ultimately find a treatment for him and other kids like him?”

Allen is a volunteer board member of the Association for Creatine Deficiencies, a parent-led organization aimed at finding and supporting research to help those with CTD and two other cerebral creatine deficiency syndromes. He says this is the “primary funder” for such research, and with the prize money officially in his hands, his next goal is to find projects to put the winnings toward, while also making sure measures are put in place to take care of Lucas.

“My goal is to help my son, and that means, how do I make sure that he’s taken care of in case mom and dad pass away? ‘Cause right now he’d have to live with us forever. How do I make sure that his brother doesn’t have to care for him as he ages?” Allen explains. “We look at how do we care for Lucas at home? And then how do we care for other Lucases around the world?”

“The last thing we want to do is put the burden on an association that doesn’t have the projects to fund,” he continues. “So our job is to help source these projects, whether they’re academic or whether they’re private. We want to invest into treatments that are gonna help Lucas and help kids like Lucas.”

The win is two-fold for Allen. Not only does he have the finances to better Lucas’ quality of life, but the experience was an immense bonding experience with Jack, who he said was his “Beast Games coach.”

“It’s one thing to experience it and you think you remember how it went. But it’s a whole other thing to watch the show and see other people’s perspective,” he explains. “It was so fun to watch with my son Jack… He taught me everything about MrBeast and all of his videos.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.  

Winning Beast Games has also allowed Allen to put his career in healthcare sales and entrepreneurship on hold to focus on other ways to raise money for CTD research. His next mission is to ruck across California, walking weights for 365 miles from Death Valley to the California coast, “representing the 365 miles that Lucas and other CTD kiddos suffer with this condition.”

Allen and other participants in his challenge will be sharing content on Instagram and YouTube as they make the journey, using their platforms to further raise awareness for cerebral creatine deficiency syndromes. But before leaving, Jack has requested he and his dad rewatch all 10 episodes of Beast Games from the beginning.

“Winning $10 million is gonna help Lucas and kids like Lucas tremendously. And to actually fund a treatment, you need tens of millions of dollars. So I’m not gonna be able to do it alone. We need a ton of support, but it’s a great start,” Allen says.

“Over the course of the next coming years, we’ll have some larger projects that we would never have been able to fund if it wasn’t for MrBeast and Beast Games.”