The Most HYPE Moments From Awesome Games Done Quick 2019
Awesome Games Done Quick 2019 was one for the record books, in every sense of the phrase. Not only was the old total for donations shattered, but some of the speedruns were the best ever. Since it would literally take a week to watch them all, we’ve gathered our personal favorites below. A new meme caught fire among the crowd during the event: every time a spherical object appeared onscreen, everyone in the room shouted “ORB!” as loudly as they could. So when you keep hearing a strange noise from the audience, that’s what that’s about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek1aa3vWsws
These “race” playthroughs can be hit and miss, but the Team Relay Race of Mega Man Xes 1 through 3 gets nail-bitingly close at times. You won’t truly know who wins until the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DayNOf9PkQ0
No checkered wall can stop Dr. Fatbody as he tears through the original Sonic the Hedgehog, utilizing glitch after glitch to beat each zone in seconds. He’s so quick that the end sign doesn’t have time to load properly and appears as gibberish.
Speaking of gotting to go fast, the meme-tastic Sanic Ball is best enjoyed with a crowd, and there just happened to be a large one at GDQ. The game’s entire existence is a joke, but they ate it up.
By now Portal has been played, replayed, re-replayed and speedran into the ground….which means the pros are now so quick at it, anyone watching can barely tell what’s going on. Case in point.
Super Mario Bros 3Mix can be enjoyed on novelty alone: it’s a hack of SMB3 that pulls in levels from other Mario games, stretching all the way to Mario Galaxy. How did they pull that off? It has to be seen to be believed.
It wasn’t long ago that Octopath Traveler was released for Switch, so the fact that someone out there can blaze through it in 47 minutes and 57 seconds is dog-goned amazing. This playthrough was a donation incentive, and was money well spent.
This would be Link to the Past on a hacked ROM where you die if you take one hit. The guy playing this only took four falls, and he pulls some absolutely death-defying maneuvers throughout.
This year’s TASBot appearance put the AI through its paces, and there was no feat more impressive than witnessing how it tore through Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.
There were some excellent picks for the Bad Games Done Quick block this year. The ugly DOS version of Mega Man, the stupefyingly bad Virtual Hydlide for Saturn, and the I-can’t-believe-this-exists Urban Yeti for GBA. Then there was Mohawk and Headphone Jack, a game that was submitted to GDQ twelve times in a row and rejected each time due to the fact that the graphics were so messed up they could not be streamed properly. This was the year the bitrate was high enough that the game could be transmitted.
The record for the longest playthrough in GDQ history has been set by Final Fantasy IX. Three dudes sat down and played the entire game over the course of one night. It took nine hours, but the feat was accomplished.
Each year we say “if you watch one, make it this one”…..it’s that time again. The Super Mario Odyssey run, which occurred near the end of the marathon, was THE playthrough of the event. Toward the end, the community rallied to push the donation mark over two million dollars before 500 moons were collected. The energy was electric; it was best experienced live, but you can still see the phenomenon for yourself.
Altogether $2.39 million dollars were raised this year for cancer research, breaking the all-time record set two years ago by SGDQ 2017. And speaking of SGDQ, the next marathon is set to begin June 23.