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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It's been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror's Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch up on.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Awesome Games Done Quick (aka AGDQ) has started yet again, and just four days in has already blessed us with some unforgettable moments and absolute must-watch PC speedruns. The clips I offer up to you today involve one speedrunner whacking out a real life model to explain a glitch, one speedrun where everything went wrong but everyone had a fabulous time anyway, and one game developer exclaiming "frick cancer in the bum."
]]>The winter half of the yearly charity speedrunning marathon Awesome Games Done Quick kicks off this Sunday, January 5th. Donations to Games Done Quick will benefit the Prevent Cancer Foundation. The week long marathon will cover a bunch of speedrunning mainstays along with some new additions from 2019.
]]>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?
]]>We're a couple days late to this party, which probably ensures our exile from the speedrunning community. This Saturday, the summer's other major charity speedrun marathon began streaming on Twitch. No, not Games Done Quick, but the lesser-known (though no less impressive in scale) European Speedrunner Assembly - ESA, for short.
Hosted at the amusingly named Quality Hotel View in Malmö, Sweden and running across two parallel streams, they're breaking games quickly and raising money for Save The Children. You can see their full week's schedule here, and both streams below.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>If you watched this year's Awesome Games Done Quick, you're already familiar with the Olympian feats of endurance and skill that players exhibit as they race through your favorite games and make you realize that, no, you aren't nearly as good at them as you might have thought. But there's another side to the coin that isn't nearly as popular as traditional speedrunning, a niche community of players prying open games and doing the unimaginable. Tool-assisted speedrunning ('TAS') might seem like simple cheating, but it's so much more than that. It's an exploration of the inner-life of video games, and it takes teams of expert players and programmers thousands of hours to do.
]]>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!
]]>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.
]]>I play games very slowly, whether they're awesome or not. I can perform a speed run of the first level of just about any first-person shooter released between 1993 and 1999 but beyond that fairly limited subset of locations (mostly military bases and pump stations), I'm cautious and methodical. On top of that, I'm also more likely to explore new worlds instead of returning to old haunts in order to improve my mental mapping, making navigation a reflex. Thankfully, the world has plenty of dedicated digital dervishes and many of them gathered for the Awesome Games Done Quick charity event, raising more than $1,000,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. The videos are linked below.
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