The enemies of Super Earth are many, from the ravenous Terminid hordes to the unflinchingly brutal Automatons. If you’ve been trawling the Helldivers 2 subreddit lately, however, you might have noticed a new name added to that list: GantzTheDemon. Interestingly, Gantz isn’t some hitherto unseen threat the developers have introduced (although those are certainly coming) but an enemy created purely by the community.
GantzTheDemon is, in fact, a player—a Helldiver like you or me—or so it would seem on the surface. Whether or not their actions are dastardly enough to merit the kind of community dogpiling they’ve received, they’ve inarguably broken a few of the golden rules of Helldivers 2 and brought the full force of Super Earth down upon themselves as a result.
What did GantzTheDemon do in Helldivers 2?
Helldivers 2 is all about cooperating with your fellow squad members, and GantzTheDemon has spat in the face of this all-important precept by repeatedly teamkilling all three other players just before extraction. Gunning down your team without so much as an emote is obviously despicable behavior in any game, but more so in Helldivers, which places that spirit of camaraderie front and center. Such a traitor to Super Earth and the cause of Managed Democracy couldn’t go unpunished, of course, and it wasn’t long before game-wide manhunts were being put together and threats against Gantz were being plastered all over Helldivers-related social media.
Even the official Discord server got in on it, with multiple players posting PSAs warning others of Gantz and their “reprehensible act of treachery.”
Some have even been calling on developer Arrowhead to work Gantz into the game’s lore and offer a tangible bounty for hunting him down, but the studio has bigger fish to fry at the moment. Besides, that kind of officially recognized notoriety would almost certainly inspire copycats—and I prefer my Helldivers without a bunch of Gantz copycats trying to shoot me in the back.
