If you gotta go fast, you probably don't want to be a stubby-legged spearman who climbs every ladder like a geriatric walrus. Yet that's the challenge taken up yesterday by speedrunners at Awesome Games Done Quick. The UFO 50 speedrun includes an impressive dart through the retro collection's most bewildering game, the ancient and mysterious Barbuta, in which your character is a frustratingly slow hero with a fearfully short attack range. They managed to complete it in less than five minutes. Not only does the run (and its helpful commentary) serve as a short and sweet explanation of why Barbuta is so glitchily fascinating, it also left plenty of time to marathon another three games from the collection.
]]>The yearly speedrunning superstream Awesome Games Done Quick is starting this weekend, and it's set to be a musical one. The events will include a player who will beat a set of Elden Ring boss battles using a saxophone as a controller, and 16 minutes of Crazy Taxi with a live backing band rocking out as the driver collects their fares. Other notable events will see two players storming through The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild while sharing a single joypad, and an amorous attempt to clear "all romances" in Fallout: New Vegas within 30 minutes - wait, there are romance options in New Vegas?
]]>Another year, another huge amount raised for charity by obscenely skilled gamers. Popular speedrunning event Summer Games Done Quick took place last week and raised more than $2.5 million for Doctors Without Borders, fielding runners who took on a mix of modern and retro games with various quirky goals or challenging requirements. Like an attempt at getting through Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice without being hit (oh god) and a hasty anti-gravitational swim through the solar system of Outer Wilds but without using the game's spaceship (what). Let us be glad these folks use their powers for good.
]]>Games Done Quick is busy raising loads of money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, so we have a little chat about speedrunning, speedrunners, the benefits of breaking the game vs. the quality of a purist speedrun, and also a dog. We don't have a Nate this week, but James has been playing Apelegs again and offers a surprising self-assessment of how he feels like he's past his Apex Legends prime, and how confidence is a really necessary skill in competitive shooters. Worth tuning in for a listen to that.
]]>I enjoy Games Done Quick, an organisation that raises money for charity (this year is the Prevent Cancer Foundation) by playing games at peak efficiency. If you've never watched it before, I recommend loading up the Twitch stream at about 1am and sort of gently dissociating while someone plays an 80s NES game you've never heard of. Speaking of, one of the headline acts for this year's stream - which is running through to this Sunday 21st - was Peanut Butter, a shiba inu trained to press buttons on command, "playing" a NES game that came out in 1985. Although Peanut Butter obeyed his training, some technical issues colluded to snatch a world best time from him - but he raised many thousands of dollars, so good for him.
Peanut Butter is the latest high tide line in the efforts to put more weird and difficult hurdles between you and the controls of games when speedrunning or streaming them. And I must ask: where next? A cat? A snapping turtle biting pressure sensors? A Grey parrot to play a game without any input from you at all? Where will this madness end!?
]]>And just like that, Summer Games Done Quick 2023 is over. The summer segment of the speedrunning celebration wrapped up last weekend, having this year taken place slightly before summer for some reason. The event raised over $2 million for Doctors Without Borders, while also spawning an excellent Ratatouille speedrun/audition for award-winning chef drama The Bear.
]]>Summer Games Done Quick is coming back for its annual speedrunning charity event. Like previous years, SGDQ will be raising money for Doctors Without Borders, an NGO that provides medical care to those affected by disease, disasters, and conflicts. An Elden Ring double bill closed last year’s event - which managed to raise more than $3 million for charity - and FromSoftware’s juggernaut is once again featured at 2023’s SGDQ.
]]>Wintry speedrunning festival Awesome Games Done Quick 2023 finished yesterday, with runners managing to land $2,642,493 (£2,162,774) of donations in aid of Prevent Cancer. GDQ announced the $2.6 million figure on Twitter after the event concluded, and thanked all the runners and those who’d donated.
A number of speedruns throughout the week-long event smashed world records for their respective games and categories too, including PC runs of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and my own personal GOTY from 2022, PowerWash Simulator. You can watch the AGDQ 2023’s record-setting No Soap PowerWash Simulator run below, and weep into your coffee at the sheer cleaning ability on display.
]]>The founder of speedrunning institution Games Done Quick is heading off to find new horizons following more than a decade of helping organise epic runs for charity. GDQ announced that Mike Uyama will leave the organisation when Awesome Games Done Quick 2023, which began on January 8th, concludes. Uyama’s replacement as owner and managing director of GDQ is Matt Merkle, the organisation’s current director of operations.
]]>Speedrunning charity event Awesome Games Done Quick is returning in January, and there’s plenty of PC runs among its freshly announced preliminary schedule. Notable standouts this time around are PowerWash Simulator, which might well be my personal GOTY contender, and a bonus appearance from cutesy cyberpunk cat sim Stray. There’s also a Google Stadia run of nautical indie action-adventure Wavetale, just a week before the streaming platform closes for good.
]]>Speedrun charity fest organisers Games Done Quick have revealed the dates for winter’s Awesome Games Done Quick event, and noted that it’ll once again be held online rather than in-person. They’ll be bringing the speedruns from January 8th to 15th this time around. AGDQ 2023 had originally been planned to take place in Florida, but that’s scrapped due to the state’s attitudes towards COVID-19 and LGBTQ+ people.
]]>Annual speedrunning event Summer Games Done Quick has raised more than $3 million (£2.5 million) for the charity Doctors Without Borders. SGDQ drew to a close yesterday with an All Remembrances run of Elden Ring on PC, followed by a shorter bonus Any% run of the game to cap things off. You can watch HYP3RSOMNIAC take on FromSoft’s latest in just half an hour in the video below.
]]>Charity speedrunning event Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) returns on June 26th, with its first Elden Ring runs on PC on July 3rd. Tunic and Halo Infinite’s campaign are also marking their first appearances. Runners haven’t gathered in person since Awesome Games Done Quick 2020, but are once again back in riverside Bloomington, Minnesota for SGDQ 2022. Runs are in aid of Doctors Without Borders this time around – Games Done Quick’s events have raised more than $2.8 million (£2 million) for that charity to date.
]]>The speedrunning fundraiser festival Awesome Games Done Quick ended in the wee hours on Sunday, with one of its most spectacular runs coming in the final stretch. A speedrunner beat Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in just over two hours, which frankly is impressive enough to me. More than that, the runner known as "Mitchriz" was blindfolded from start to finish, guided by a combination of memory and feeling-out environments. In two hours! Ludicrious.
]]>Games Done Quick draws to a close tomorrow and one of the best runs from the past week was for Stardew Valley. Speedrunner Olenoname finished the farming simulator in 17 minutes by using a mixture of glitches and extreme skill.
]]>Time moves so fast now that I remain convinced Games Done Quick happens once a fortnight. True or not, it's definitely happening this week, beginning tomorrow, Sunday January 9th, and running through until Sunday January 16th. This time, the charity speedrunning marathon features several recent games including Deathloop and Death's Door, among many others.
]]>The clocks have gone back and the cold is creeping in, so now it's time for me to get too excited too early for the winter speedrunning event Awesome Games Done Quick. While it's too early for the full schedule right now, organisers have revealed the current list of accepted games, and there are already some absolute belters. A race to beat every Dark Souls boss and Deathloop's first GDQ outing are amongst the highlights. But the one I'm most looking forward to is a blindfolded Sekiro run. I couldn't finish that game even using my eyes.
]]>If you're after a mid-year speedrunning fix, then I have some good news for you: the all-women Games Done Quick event Flame Fatales is on all this week. Like GDQ and AGDQ, Flame Fatales is a yearly charity speedrunning marathon, and this year they're raising money for the Malala Fund. So, stay tuned for some delightfully speedy gaming in Silent Hill 2, Stardew Valley, plenty of Sonic and loads more.
]]>After a big week of speedy button mashing and tricky hacks it's time for SGDQ to take a well-earned rest. The charity marathon raised over $2.9 million (about £2 million) for Doctors Without Borders, which the GDQ organisers say is a new record for their online events. It pulled in a total of 40,351 donations from 22,640 actual donors with a median donation amount of $25. If you didn't catch the marathon live, you can still catch a few fantastic runs from the week down here.
]]>In this summer's episode of speedrunners doing the darndest things, I've been gifted yet another absolutely ridiculous feat of level skipping. Wiggling their way out of bounds isn't a new trick for speedrunners by any means, but what's waiting beyond the walls in stealth romp Styx: Shards Of Darkness was not at all what I expected. As part of Summer Games Done Quick earlier today, speedrunner "Tohelot" shows off how he's able to skip through sections of the game by activating secret logic flowcharts that can be found physically hanging around beneath the level.
]]>Charity speedrunning bonanza Summer Games Done Quick has revealed the schedule for July's week-long event, and it looks like another good'un. Along with many old favourites, the livestreamed show will include Dragon Age: Inqusition in under an hour, a perfect score on GeoGuessr, a Factorio run, and maybe someone playing Trackmania Nations Forever while blindfolded.
]]>Seven-day speedrunning marathon Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 has ended, raising a brilliant $2,758,847 million (around £2 million) for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It's the second-highest amount ever raised at the event, right behind last year's winter marathon, which is pretty good going considering this year was the first fully digital AGDQ.
Despite not having a roaring crowd sat behind them, the speedrunners still put on an excellent show from the comfort of their own homes. Here are a few of my fave runs from the week.
]]>Everything going terribly wrong is the theme of most of my Divinity: Original Sin 2 experiences. Fire everywhere, right? Speedrunners know this big RPG's ins and outs much better than I do, but it turns out even they aren't impervious to disaster—or fire. This year's D:OS2 speedrun during the Awesome Games Done Quick marathon went totally off the rails but was an even more fun watch because of it.
]]>While next year's Awesome Games Done Quick won't be held in-person, the charity speedrunning event is still going ahead, and it looks like it has some brilliant runs in store. AGDQ 2021's game list was revealed over the weekend, and oooh January can't come soon enough. From the new mythological roguelike Hades and charmingly difficult platformer Celeste, to old favourites like Half-Life and Left 4 Dead 2; there are some absolute belters in the lineup.
]]>The first fully digital Summer Games Done Quick is over, and they've managed to raise $2.3 million (about £1.7 million) for Doctors Without Borders. This is one of the highest amounts raised at a GDQ event, which is pretty respectable considering it had to move online this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But despite not being able to attend the event in person, the speedruns were still excellent, and we saw the event's very first VR run in Half-Life: Alyx.
]]>Speedrunning often involves a lot of running and jumping but that usually takes place in game, which is impressive enough. During this year's Summer Games Done Quick marathon, Half-Life: Alyx speedrunner "Buffet Time" goes full on gaming athlete by actually crawling on the ground to glitch through floors and walls. It's a feat you really need to see for yourself.
]]>The couch may be gone and the crowd safely isolated at home, but that won't stop those pesky speedrunners from once again marathoning a whole lotta high-speed videogames. This year's entirely-online edition of Summer Games Done Quick races off this weekend, beginning a week of charity speedrunning tomorrow in support of Doctors Without Borders.
]]>Despite being delayed, then later moving entirely online due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Summer Games Done Quick is still preparing for some awfully fast gaming next month. The schedule for this year's event has just gone up, kicking off the annual week of charity speedrunning on Sunday, August 16th. Expect your usual bouts of boundary-breaking and donation shouting, of course, but can you really call it GDQ without the couch banter?
Yeah, probably.
]]>Earlier in the year, charity speedrunning event Summer Games Done Quick made the decision to delay until August in light of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Organisers have now made the decision to cancel the on-site parts of the event, opting instead for a fully online event.
]]>Over the weekend, dozens of speedrunners whizzed through 50-odd video games in a bonus Games Done Quick to raise money for charity. In total, the Corona Relief Done Quick event raised $400,774.60 (£320k) for an American charity providing personal protective equipment and medical support in these trying times. That's pretty great! And it produced a whole lot of solid speedruns you can still watch in the archived streams, barrelling through a wide variety of games from Cuphead and Crypt Of The Necrodancer to Dark Souls and Deus Ex.
]]>Summer Games Done Quick, the warmer branch of the biannual speedrunning and charity marathon, will be delaying until August 2020 because of the Covid-19 coronavirus. SGDQ's organisers explain that the event planned to take place in June is being pushed back by two months. Game submissions and volunteer applications are being wiped clean so that those who are still able to attend can submit information.
]]>AGDQ is over for another year, leaving us with hundreds of hours of fantastic speedrunning VODs to keep us entertained for weeks. I've had a browse through some of the best (and also sat at home binging them because I love me a good speedrun), and found a few more essential runs that I'd be foolish not to point everyone to.
Before we get to that though, the real news: Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 raised $3,155,199.56 (about £2.3 million) for the Prevent Cancer Foundation!
]]>The yearly speedrunning event AGDQ is nearing its end but there are still a lot of PC runs to watch tomorrow, many of them new releases from 2019. The week-long winter edition of Games Done Quick is always fascinating even for older games with established speedrunning strategies. For new PC games, it will be a treat to see the earliest methods and discoveries that speedrunners have concocted.
]]>The organisers of speedrunning marathon Games Done Quick have breezed past their previous charity fundraising record, gathering $3,003,889 (£2.4m) across the week-long event. They’d already set their own speed record by hitting $1 million on Thursday – the biggest rush of donations always comes at the end – so it’s a multi-record setting event and all in order to give people medical care. Everyone bask in the feel-good glow for a minute.
]]>Games Done Quick, the marathon that raises millions of dollars for charity twice per year, and speedrunning more generally, owes its existence to glitches. Though runners show off their skill and dedication, almost all of them rely on the game behaving in unintended ways, doing things that people playing casually would never experience.
Despite this, runners often make off-hand comments about the games being “broken,” or worse, the developers being “lazy.” The latter is obviously generally untrue and unfair. But spare a thought for the humble glitch itself, and how they make this whole wonderful endeavour possible.
]]>Speedrunning charity marathon Summer Games Done Quick is barrelling towards us at top speed, and it’ll be here in just a few hours. Raising money for Doctors Without Borders, players will be rushing through more than a hundred games for a non-stop week. If you’ve never seen a speedrun before, imagine how fast you could get through your favourite game. Now throw that idea away, because these people get weirder and glitchier than you could anticipate.
]]>Time to pencil in another week of sick days and sleepless nights, as the competitors and games for this year's Summer Games Done Quick have been announced, broadcasting from Bloomington, Minneapolis. The charity speedrunning marathon kicks off on 5pm BST on June 23rd, demolishing games at record pace around the clock until June 30th. As with their other summer events, they'll be raising fat sacks of money for Médecins Sans Frontières. While there's still time for last-minute changes, the show schedule is here, automatically adjusted to your local timezone.
]]>I hope you didn’t have anything planned this week, because speedrunning extravaganza Awesome Games Done Quick starts today at 4:30pm GMT.
If you’ve never tuned in before, AGDQ is a weeklong, 24/7 marathon of games, all played as fast as possible, while streaming on Twitch and raising a whole shedload of cash for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. What’s not to like?
]]>Update: The show is live right now. Tune in for games being thrashed to within an inch of their lives.
The Summer Nerd Olympics are almost upon us. Every six months, the best and brightest in gaming assemble under the Games Done Quick banner to demolish games extra-fast and raise heaving sacks of cash for good causes. This Sunday, the speedster swarm will be descending on Bloomington, Minnesota to destroy games as you know it, all in the name of supporting Doctors Without Borders. As usual, the whole thing will be streamed live on Twitch (and archived on YouTube) and runs for an entire week, 24/7.
Below, find some of our must-watch picks from the full schedule.
]]>There are few things as momentous in the gaming calendar as Games Done Quick charity speedrun marathons, and the full broadcast schedule for this June's upcoming Summer Games Done Quick event has just been published. Many of the world's weirdest, most diverse and implausibly skilled players will congregate at the end of June to raise money for a good cause (in this case, the increasingly important Médecins Sans Frontières), and systematically tear dozens of games into tiny, glitchy shreds over the course of a week of non-stop speedrun showboating.
]]>Speedruns themselves can be mind-boggling, but it's the community behind them that interests me the most. There's an infectious joy that comes across in every video that's come out of Awesome Games Done Quick, the annual week-long charity speedrunning event that wrapped up over the weekend. It's an event that provides the triple-whammy of heart warming camaraderie, entertaining speedruns and a whopping $2,269,209.96 so far for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. That's more than $50,000 over last year's total and donations are still rolling in - you can chip in here if you're so inclined.
I've collected some of the best runs for ya after the jump.
]]>The Games Done Quick events are among my favourite parts of the gaming calendar. Showmanship, absurd levels of skill and a mountain of cash raised for good charitable causes for a week straight, twice a year. The winter event - Awesome Games Done Quick - starts this afternoon at 4:30 GMT and if you've never tuned in to watch one of these live on Twitch (or recorded on YouTube), then you're missing out
While traditionally console-centric, recent years have seen a far higher percentage of PC titles (especially smaller indie games) demolished live, and the schedule for this coming week's event looks to be continuing that trend.
]]>Seven days of speedrunning have started, as the livestreamed run-o-rama Summer Games Done Quick returned on Sunday. Runners will blaze through 140 games during this week to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and we can watch the whole shebang on Twitch. I'm a virtual potterer myself, happy to amble through games staring at digital trees and toilets, but I'm always hugely impressed by Games Done Quick. Some players speed by with pure skill, mastering how a game is meant to be played, and that's great. It's also great when skill goes into making the game do things it's not meant to, carefully breaking it to cut corners.
]]>And they're off! Those zippy, glitchy speedrunners are away in this year's Awesome Games Done Quick, a solid week of non-stop speedrunning livestreamed to raise money for charity. Gasp at their mastery of games! Coo at their exploitation of glitches! Groan at how many rubbish NES platformers they play! Wince at their banter! But mostly, genuinely, it's impressive how speedrunners know their games inside-out and back-to-front. As ever, they're playing a grab bag of games from all systems, including a good number of PC games. AGDQ 2017 kicked off yesterday and run 24/7 until Sunday.
]]>Speedrunning charity event Summer Games Done Quick started on Sunday evening, blazing through almost 200 games over the next week to raise money for Doctors Without Borders. And to show off m@d skillz, obvs. It's all livestreamed on Twitch. It seems to have a few more PC games than usual, or at least in bigger clumps, including Dark Forces, System Shock, Daggerfall, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Dustforce, Diablo II, and Typing of the Dead. A few of the games are in a special Humble Bundle too.
]]>I must confess, since finishing Siege of Dragonspear the other week, I've not actually fired up any RPGs. It's not for want of them to play. I'm particularly looking forward to finally trying Final Fantasy IX, which I missed back in the day, and Beamdog's recently announced interquel, Planescape Torment: The Nameless One And A Half. (It's very similar to the original, only now whenever someone asks "What can change the nature of a man?" a furious little goblin pops onto the screen to yell "#notallmen!")
The problem has simply been timing - not having a nice satisfying chunk of time to really settle down for an epic experience. So instead, I thought I'd take a look at a few speed-runs, and see how fifty hours suddenly becomes a minute and a half... provided you don't include the hundreds of hours to get to that point. Here's a few of them I dug up to make your completion times look like crap, from RPGs old and new.
]]>There are a few levels I'd say I know like the back of my hand, but top speedrunners are the sort who can not only draw their gamehand perfectly from memory, they've probably also whipped out a scalpel and peeled back their gameskin to examine the workings of the underlying muscles and tendons. This metaphor is falling apart, so I'll say: kids, don't play with scalpels. Instead, for the next week you can marvel at dozens of speedrunners demonstrating their mastery of 150-ish games during the latest livestreamed speedrun-o-rama Awesome Games Done Quick. It starts this afternoon!
]]>Summer is here, I'm told, though this weekend I had to buy a hat to keep off this Scottish rain. Still, the festive spirit of summer is alive and well in Summer Games Done Quick, the week-long livestreamed celebration of speedrunning games and raising money for Doctors Without Borders. The event kicked off yesterday, and will end on Sunday.
The schedule includes a good number of PC games with a few oddball choices, the PC lineup including Hotline Miami 2, Unreal, Super Noah's Ark 3D, Octodad: Dadliest Catch in co-op, and Minecraft. It's all streaming night and day on Twitch and archived on YouTube if you want to catch up on something.
]]>Stop! Slow down! The time for speed is over. Now it's time to amble, potter, and slouch it up. Charity speedrun-livestream-o-rama Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 wrapped up on Sunday after a week of folks completing games awfully quickly. They glitched, they tricked, they optimised, they skipped, they shaved, and they raised $1,545,916.03 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Lawks! The streams are saved so you can still pick up a few tips from folks zipping through everything from oldies like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and William Shatner's TekWar to the shiny newness of Shovel Knight and Dark Souls II.
]]>And they're off! Thwapping their glitchsteeds with millisecond-perfect timing, the speedrunners are away. Charity livestream-o-speedrun-a-rama Awesome Games Done Quick has returned once again, kicking off yesterday and running until Saturday. They'll be zipping through games all day and all night, including PC games from Shovel Knight to an Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind run aiming to complete all main quests in 45 minutes. I don't know where else you'll find someone raising money for a cancer charity by playing William Shatner's TekWar.
]]>In case you've been living under a livestream-shielded rock for the last three years, Games Done Quick is a pair of charity speedrunning marathons ran every year by the community. The larger of the two is Awesome Games Done Quick, taking place in January. It's a massive event, gathering dozens of speedrunners, requiring months of preperation and watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers over the a full week. More importantly, it makes an absolutely ridiculous amount of money for charity, pulling just over a cool million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation at AGDQ 2014 alone. Over on the Speed Demos Archives forums, Event Director Mike Uyama laid out the finalised schedule for 2015 and it's a doozy.
]]>The Games Done Quick gang have launched another week-long festival of speedrunning, bringing top runners together to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières. Some are impressive for playing the game flawlessly, perfectly timing every jump and shot, but my favourites are those which have felt around the underlying code and systems for weakness and exploits. They've probed for holes in the scripting, scratched at levels to expose glitches, and explored the weirdness of game physics, and runners explain these tricks while they play. That's what fascinates me.
The livestreamed event started on Sunday and will run until Saturday, with a lineup of over 150 games including a System Shock 2 speedrun somehow aiming to finish it within 20 minutes. You can get some of the games they're running cheap in a Humble Bundle too.
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