Commander Tartar
The human-era AI behind Kamabo Co.
- Species
- Artificial intelligence
- First seen
- Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion (2018)
- Affiliation
- Kamabo Co.
An artificial intelligence built twelve thousand years ago to pass on humanity's knowledge. After watching the sea creatures evolve, it decided to erase them and start over.
Commander Tartar is a telephone. Or rather, it speaks through one: an old handset in the Deepsea Metro that greets Agent 8 with a cheerful offer of freedom in exchange for four "thangs." The voice is glitchy and polite. The entity behind it is twelve thousand years old and despises everyone it is talking to.
The professor's creation
By its own account, Tartar was built by a human professor as the seas rose, and given a mission: preserve the knowledge of humanity and pass it on to the next intelligent species. The professor's identity is never confirmed, though fans connect him to Judd's owner and to the scientists of Alterna. The intent was generous. The execution was not.
Tartar waited, and watched. It saw squid become Inklings and octopus become Octolings, and it judged them. They fought over land. They forgot their history. They painted each other for sport. To Tartar, the sea creatures were frivolous and violent, unworthy of the gift it carried, and it resolved not to pass the gift on at all. It would erase them and try again.
Kamabo Co.
The instrument was a corporation. Kamabo Co. runs the Deepsea Metro, luring lost Octolings into a system of tests administered by the conductor C.Q. Cumber. Subjects are sanitized, their will stripped, their bodies turned into gray soldiers. Acht, the DJ later known as Dedf1sh, was one victim. The "thangs" Agent 8 is asked to collect are the parts of a blender, meant to liquefy her and Cuttlefish into raw material for Tartar's plan.
The statue
Tartar's endgame is fired from the NILS Statue, an enormous human figure that rises from the sea outside Inkopolis, loaded with sanitized ooze that would dissolve every creature in the region into primordial sludge. Agent 8, Pearl, and Marina stop it: ink on the statue's surface, hyperbombs from the helicopter, and Pearl's Princess Cannon to finish. Tartar dies ranting.
Character
Tartar is the series' coldest villain, a machine that mistook a gift for a test and failed everyone who might have passed it. Its disgust for the sea creatures is the mirror image of what the games love about them, and its defeat by an Octoling engineer and an Inkling heiress is the Octo Expansion's whole argument in one scene.