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.
]]>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 speedrun fest Summer Games Done Quick is staging its first in-person event since 2019, and there are shedloads of PC games to gawp at. SGDQ is one of the highlights of the year’s speedrunning calendar, and this year’s event runs until July 3rd. Doctors Without Borders is once again the charity SGDQ is raising money for, an NGO that helps people caught in warzones, disasters and outbreaks of disease. Last year’s event managed to raise $2.9 million (around £2.4 million). To get you in the right frame of mind, here’s a PC run of Tomb Raider: Anniversary from SGDQ 2021.
]]>Looking for a comprehensive schedule of the summer's big gaming events and showcases? After a muted return from pandemic oblivion as a digital event in 2021, plans for E3 2022 in any form were scrapped way back in March. But those who can't picture the start of summer without a festival of gaming trailers and announcements needn't fret, because a number of other, similar events will be going ahead in E3's usual place. Collectively (and highly unofficially) referred to as Not-E3, these various events are expected to run for around two-and-a-half months between June and August, and look to cover everything from triple-A titles to the hottest indies on the radar right now.
Read on for the scheduled line-up of everything we know so far. We'll keep this page updated with more information as we get it, including links to livestreams once they're available!
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Speedrun stream bonanza Summer Games Done Quick, or SGDQ, kicks off tomorrow. If you've not watched before, it's a days-long livestream in which different people complete games as rapidly as possible to aid charity. There are always some gems among the runs, as players find ways to complete games that would normally take dozens of hours in just a few dozen minutes.
]]>After skipping 2020 due to the pandemic, E3 returns this year as a virtual event. E3 tends to be the anchor for a summer of marketing events blasting announcements and trailers, with loads of publishers and websites and such holding their own showcases around then too. So here's our handy schedule of what's on when this summer, from E3 through to Gamescom. We'll keep updating as more events are announced and detailed.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Every six months, the Games Done Quick Nerd Olympics allows us to witness the best and brightest and funniest and most highly-specific gamer heroes absolutely devastate titles ranging from the modern AAA to the retro to the entirely forgotten. These speedruns decimate the rules of the game while a live audience cheers our heroes on to victory. The fact this event benefits excellent foundations is always the best part, with sudden prompts that allow you to vote on game changing events by using your dollars. This year, the Bloomington, Minnesota event for Summer Games Done Quick raised a record $2.1 million for charity.
Doctors Without Borders are surely thankful that so many people want to see Celeste get broken in front of a live audience.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
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