The Protoss win.
In Utter Darkness is a mission in StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty that you’re destined to lose. The protoss are making a last stand against zerg forces: The goal isn’t victory, but to protect the construction of an archive that might aid some future species in their own war against the zerg. Hold the line, kill enough zerg, and you win—even though, y’know, you lose. But what if you could beat back destiny—what if you didn’t lose?
YouTuber Davey Gunface set himself to the impossible task, and 14 years after StarCraft 2 launched, he’s managed to pull it off. He didn’t win, strictly speaking, because there is no win condition, but he didn’t lose, either. By employing very high-level StarCraft 2 strategies, and taking advantage of some weaknesses in the enemy AI, he was able to lock the zerg into an effective stalemate.
Davey’s breakdown of his strategy is the kind of deep magic that will make sense to committed StarCraft 2 veterans and absolutely no one else, but it turns on a few key points. The arrival of the final wave of protoss reinforcements includes Artanis, enabling what Davey calls the “Archon Bidet,” essentially a variation of the Archon Toilet, which I discovered today is actually a well-known protoss tactic that allows for large numbers of enemies to be wiped out very quickly.
“There’s a reason I’m calling it the Achon Bidet, and not just the Archon Toilet,” Davey says. “Because here’s the thing: Artanis has 500 energy compared to the base mothership’s 200, so instead of being able to cast only two abilities at max energy, Chad-tanis over here can cast up to five in rapid succession.”
This is important because of another mothership ability, Mass Recall, which Davey was able to use to pack a few ground units into a specific small crevice. Not enough to make a real difference, except—he’s going even deeper here—when combined with Vortex and Artanis’ much greater energy cap, which enabled him to squeeze about 24 Templars into the space, which then morphed into Archons, who can tear through waves of enemy air attacks with ease.
Even in that crevice, the protoss forces can still be attacked by some zerg units, meaning they would eventually be wiped out but for the next step in the strategy: “Abuse the AI.” In most StarCraft 2 missions, according to Davey, losing all your structures means game over no matter how many forces you have deployed. But because In Utter Darkness is a glorious last stand, all your structures and units have to be wiped out in order to lose. But because the AI recognizes it can’t reach the Archons in the crevice after destroying his main base and tracking down and killing Zeratul, the zerg forces just stop, “stun locked for the rest of eternity,” as Davey put it.
The final nail in the zerg coffin is the result of a limitation in StarCraft 2 itself. To prevent lag, the game will at a certain point stop spawning new units until existing units are killed. But because everything on the map is effectively inactive, nothing happens. “After you hold off for long enough and you set up everything correctly, the protoss just live,” Davey says. “Forever.”
And if simple existence until the heat death of the universe isn’t good enough, there’s even a way to keep killing zerg until there’s nothing left but unarmed Overseers, who “fly away to hang out outside the map, which results in literally hundreds of them just vibing in the middle of nowhere, out of bounds.” Supply block eventually kicks in, preventing any more units of any kind of spawning, and with absolutely nothing left that can threaten them, the protoss do indeed win, even though they will never see a checkmark in the W column.
Of course, this outcome has repercussions that go beyond just the survival of the protoss: The demonstration of protoss power means Kerrigan isn’t really needed to ensure the survival of the universe, and since nobody has to deal with that headache, the trickle-down effect is that the trilogy never happens. “StarCraft 2 ends here with me and the boys menacingly hovering over this dumb rock for all eternity,” Davey says. “And I’m kind of all right with that.”
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