The Most HYPE Moments From Awesome Games Done Quick 2020
Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 ended Sunday night and, once again, set a record for itself: $3.13 million was raised in just one week for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Not bad for an event that, just ten years ago, was being held for the first time — in a basement somewhere.
There were many memorable runs this year, and since it would literally take a week to watch every single one of them, we’ve picked a bunch of our favorites. And away we go…
This speaks for itself: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, two players on one controller, BOTH BLINDFOLDED. Little Mac never took a single blow.
Bad Games Done Quick never fails to be one of the star attractions of each marathon. This year’s block led itself off with the horrible Game Boy Color Animorphs game, which believe it or not shipped to stores missing its final level. A cheat code has to be put in to access it…
Following that was Super Hydlide for the Genesis, which is the best game in the Hydlide series — and that should tell you something. Multiple memes were born from this playthrough, some the player anticipated and prepared signs for beforehand.
I thought by now I’d seen every way Ocarina of Time could be torn apart, but runner ZFG took glitch speedrunning to new heights. He found a way to collect every item in the game in a little under three hours, mainly by exploiting an absolutely insane and complicated glitch.
The video for Darkened Skye is worth watching just for the story behind its creation, which runner Lizstar tells eloquently. If you don’t know, the power-ups you earn in this game are literal Skittles.
This is nuts! Link to the Past has appeared in GDQs before, but never like this: viewers could influence the game by voting with Twitch bits, which caused runner Andy no end of frustration. Even Link changes form, from Psyduck to Zero Suit Samus to a pug in a leotard.
The release of Super Mario Maker 2 meant we could finally get some more Mario Maker love at GDQ. Speedrunning and user-built Mario levels are a “peanut butter in my chocolate” level of compatibility…they work together so well.
Super Mario World played with two players at the same time through a hack that switches between Mario and Luigi once a second. The challenge: beat the game under these conditions in eleven minutes!
This is the moment everyone was anticipating all week….the playthrough of Untitled Goose Game. We know this because the most repeated meme by a mile was “HONK.” It was shouted endlessly by the crowd and referenced repeatedly in donation messages. “ORB” got some time in the sun this year, but there’s a new clear favorite.
Finally, the traditional end run of Super Metroid was majorly spiced up with the hack “Super Metroid Impossible,” which rearranges the items, scatters resources to the wind, and greatly increases the damage from enemy collisions. Oh yeah, and it adds one-hit spikes everywhere.