Video game heroes and villains can’t actually feel the horrible chill of ice water streaming down their backs, but as long as they help money flow to combat ALS, who cares?
If you have somehow remained in the dark about the ice bucket challenge, it works like this: Someone accepts a bucket of ice water dumped over their head and then nominates other people to accept the challenge. Said nominees can then either donate $100 toward research to combat ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or accept the frigid dousing and nominate others to follow suit.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Patrick Stewart recently recorded videos for the challenge that are hilarious. Now we have some virtual characters to add to the bucket list, thanks to development studies Digital Extremes and Bungie.
Warframe is a free-to-play, third-person multiplayer game developed by Digital Extremes about a future where the solar system has been overrun by various alien species. Players wear armored fighting suits, the titular warframes, to try and retake our planets one at a time.
One of the factions in Warframe are the Corpus, a greedy conglomerate of arms dealers. A Warframe player accepted the ice bucket challenge, and then challenged the Corpus to do the same. Two Corpus soldiers did so unwillingly, thanks to a pair of warframe-equipped warriors. Digital Extremes also pledged $10,000 to ALS research.
The Corpus then nominated the Ghost AI from Destiny, Claptrap the robot from the Borderlands franchise, and Master Chief from the Halo series. No word yet from Claptrap or Master Chief, but the Ghost floated to the challenge.
The best part of this video is it gave Peter Dinklage an opportunity to reprise his “That wizard was from the moon” line, that became a running joke embraced by Destiny, but was later cut from the game.
Said wizard then nominated Jonathan Irons, the character depicted by Kevin Spacey in the upcoming Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Joel, the protagonist from The Last Of Us, and George Lucas.
Bungie might have been out of bounds by interjecting a real person into this virtual circuit of challenges, but it also pledged that 20 percent of the profits from the Bungie online store will be donated to ALS research until Sept. 9, the day Destiny is released. So, we’ll give them a pass on the Lucas nomination.
We’ll keep an eye out to see if Claptrap, Master Chief, Irons, or Joel step up for the ice bucket, or whether they choose to cut some $100 checks, instead.
Screengrab via Bungie