Matthew Judge, or Twitch streamer and YouTube creator DarkViperAU, has been working on his “pacifist run” of GTA V for three years. You might know “pacifism” as abhorring all violence, but pacifist video game runs have a more Machiavellian approach to world peace: It’s okay to kill, as long as the killing is a bare-bones necessity to completing the game.
Under this generous interpretation of pacifism, Judge carefully completed his non-violent violent playthrough of one of the most depraved, stupidly bloody games ever made. Now any squeamish GTA V player knows the truth: To make it through to the game’s end, without using any cheats or mods, you need to kill at least 96 people.
That’s still a lot of people. What about those 96 people’s friends and families, you say, who walk like there is a lobster attached to the seat of their pants? Well, they’ll just have to keep walking. Compared to a Reddit user’s 2021 estimation that you have to kill “at least 726 people” (Judge called this Redditor an “idiot” in a 2021 video), 96 murders is holy work.
He was able to accomplish the feat primarily by hoping that NPCs and environmental elements—I’m counting the game’s many flying bullets and tank missiles as environmental—would find the right home. He hid to avoid taking those bullets himself, crawled around to avoid aggravating the wrong characters, and performed painstaking experimentation. At one point, Judge says he waited “eons” finding a way to get a murder-required NPC to drive, repeatedly, into the ocean and take enough damage to die on his own.
“In 15 minutes, I had only managed to get them into the ocean twice, and I had no idea how many times I had to do it,” he said.
While 15 minutes may not exactly be “eons,” it does add up. In the end, Judge says he filmed 1,000 hours of pacifist run footage. While his total of 96 proves you don’t necessarily need to be cold-blooded to play GTA V, those 1,000 hours tell me you’re better off trying to learn how to knit or something.
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