Halo 2’s “Impossible” $20,000 Challenge has finally been accomplished

They said it was impossible, and for almost two decades that seemed to be the case. But last night, a streamer named Jervalin struck halo 2‘s LASO deathless challenge and earned a cool $20,000 in the process. Talk about ending the fight.

Let’s rewind. Earlier this summer, the YouTuber Charles “Cr1tikal” White Jr. put up a $5,000 bounty to beat halo 2 on the hardest difficulty, with every bonus challenge modifier activated, without dying. In the 18 years since halo 2When it was released on Xbox in 2004, no one had ever released proof of completing the challenge. White’s challenge calls for the entire run to be streamed, either on YouTube or Twitch. No one had successfully stepped on the plate until July, so last month, White added an additional $15,000 to the bounty.

Most observers keeping an eye on the challenge got their money’s worth Jervalin— a relatively private streamer who has garnered a modest following for setting world records on a variety of gloriole Challenges – being the first person to complete them. In fact, he crossed the finish line late last night. (Here is the archived stream.)

Neither White nor Jervalin could be reached for comment in time for publication.

Jervalin was remarkably cool finishing what some people, including White Jr., have called the “toughest challenge in all of gaming,” addressing viewers in the balanced tone you’d use while moving on to the next addendum in one mostly empty pass community board meeting.

“All right, talk,” he said. “I think we made it. I think we fucking did it. Imagine. Two years ago I said, ‘I think that’s impossible.’ Just imagine that.”

Whether or not halo 2The “LASO deathless” challenge is really the “toughest … in gaming” is of course a subjective benchmark. But it’s definitely up there. You must activate any skulls or gameplay modifiers in the game that usually increase difficulty. For example, the Catch Skull makes enemies throw grenades more often. Hunger, meanwhile, means enemies drop half the ammo they normally would. Mythic doubles the health of all enemies, while Enraged increases the enemy’s rate of fire. Blind removes your HUD. Assassins make enemies invisible. (It’s not technical Everyone skull, however. Envy is left out for the challenge, as it also grants you invisibility, which you don’t do halo 2 harder, for obvious reasons.) All in all, if you turn on each skull and play on Legendary, the game’s highest difficulty, you more or less create a set of conditions that ensure that taking damage will cause you to die instantly.

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Jervalin had to rely on a few exploits to complete the challenge. Namely: He brought a Banshee, a purple aircraft with a powerful cannon, into the final boss fight against Tartarus in the “Great Journey” level. This final battle takes place on a series of orbiting platforms suspended over a chasm. With pinpoint precision, he used the Banshee’s cannon to chase down waves of enemies as they appeared – before they even got a chance to fight.

I covered those gloriole Community for a while and can’t remember a time when I’ve seen players who were pretty much unanimous in one opinion, let alone a positive one. Secure, Halo infinitythe newest game in the series has its problems that Players are not afraid to criticize. But even among the biggest names, there remains a reverence for Bungie’s original mid-2000s games and the incredibly impressive feats players can pull off.

The run collected praise out gloriole Streamers like Remy “Mint Blitz” and Luc “HiddenXperia”. Emanuel Lovejoy, the coach of Cloud 9, probably the best professional gloriole team on the planet right now, called Jervalin a “legend”. It did UberNick by Spacestation Gaming. That gloriole per Kyle Elam written down how yesterday’s scrims – basically matches between pro players who don’t count towards the official season record – were paused so players could watch Jervalin pull it off together. “We need Jervalin to do a twitter so we can actually @ this legend [clapping hands emoji]” gloriole eSports analyst and caster Alexander “Shyway” Hope said. It was a real pleasure to witness such universal recognition from all corners of the community.

But the most heartwarming moment — the kind of moment that proves itself This, not the toxicity breathing in so much oxygen from the room is what video games are about – happened in the final seconds of the stream: Jervalin’s family ran into the stream and hugged him in an almost suffocatingly tight bear hug. $20,000 is nice. That’s nicer.