Helldivers 2 CEO seemingly accepts fans' $1,000 challenge to play on the nastiest difficulty, but it might already be backfiring: "Quite a few rupture strain a**holes"

Helldivers 2 soldier watches a nuclear explosion in the distance with his arms stretched wide — (Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani is undertaking what might be the greatest challenge on Super Earth: try not to embarrass yourself in front of your friends. Discord posts suggest the Helldivers 2 studio lead has hesitantly accepted one fan's $1,000 wager to play the game on the maximum, Super Helldive difficulty for the sake of proving its "balance."

In a Reddit post, which has collected over 26,000 upvotes in four days, a player requested that Arrowhead "upload a video of 4 of their developers playing an entire operation on Oshaune on difficulty 10 and completing all objectives on all three missions on the current MO," and "Show us how it's done and how well the game's balance is," in exchange for $1,000 to a charity of the developer's choice. Jorjani is now at least experimenting with the bet, which another fan specifically assigned to him for an extra $1,000 donation, and getting hit by stray laser cannons.

The CEO wrote on Discord March 2 that he wanted players to "help me identify everything in the loadout assigned to me," so he could "take the loadout for a spin" while playing with a friend. He ultimately went to the foggy planet Nivel with his Level 58 character and quickly realized "the spear cooldown is nuts" before losing it to "quite a few rupture strain assholes." Meanwhile, a fan had their own realization – they'd accidentally killed the Arrowhead CEO.

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But Jorjani doesn't seem deterred by friendly fire. He went back to work today – on his Oshaune run, that is – again getting advice from players on Discord until he had to leave, because "movie night starts soon. [...] Next up is (don't @ me) OCTOPUSSY." Well, if it's in the name of charity.