Streamer Charlie ‘Cr1tikal’ White has a challenge for you, Halo fans: all you need to do is beat Halo 2 at a certain difficulty level (without dying) and he’ll give you $20,000. The thing is, that custom difficulty level is one that makes the game seemingly impossible.
Via PCGamesN, that difficulty level is known as “LASO,” or Legendary All Skulls On, a fan-made set of conditions which not only sets the game at Legendary, but then introduces a range of modifiers set by the game’s skulls. These can include stuff like giving more enemies more health, or putting less ammo in your clips.
It is a brutal way to play the game. Here’s a Reddit thread from a few years ago where someone boasts of having completed Halo 2 LASO, albeit with the caveat that “my deaths measured in the triple digits.” Cr1tikal’s challenge involves not dying even once.
Describing this as his “Willy Wonka moment,” Cr1tikal initially offered a reward of $5,000, but has since bumped that up by $15,000 because it’s a task he believes is, “the hardest challenge that currently exists in all gaming.” I don’t know about that, but it certainly sounds tough: in the 18 years since Halo 2's release, no player has ever been able to prove they’ve completed a deathless LASO run (well, one has, but I’ll get to that). It’s so hard that Cr1tikal says after watching people trying to take his money for the past three weeks, “99%” of players couldn’t get past the game’s first level, and most—himself included—can’t even get past the first couple of rooms.
The rules are: the run has to streamed live, on either Twitch or YouTube. You must be playing Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty with 13 of the game’s skulls on, but the one known as “Envy” turned off. That’s because one player has claimed to have completed a LASO run without dying previously, but they were using this skull, which replaces Master Chief’s flashlight with the ability to become invisible via active camouflage. Which isn’t making things harder at all, so disabling it sounds entirely fair given the point of this challenge.