The Most HYPE Moments From Awesome Games Done Quick 2021
Another frenzied week of button-mashing has come and gone, and when the dust settled, Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 had managed to raise over 2.7 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. And in the meantime, they busted records, performed incredible feats and gave us memorable moments like these:
By this point, Celeste has been speedrun at GDQ many times….but it’s never been played with someone’s feet. PeekingBoo used his home dance pad to race through the newly added C-Side lavels, which are the toughest levels in the entire game. Half of them were breezed through in one try. Again, it was controlled entirely with his feet. We still don’t know how he did it.
This was the year GDQ dared to speedrun Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. If you’ve somehow missed the decade’s worth of memes relating to this game, it’s a side-view Zelda title made by electronics company Philips instead of Nintendo. Through a legal quirk they were given the chance no other company has ever been given again. This is why.
This was also the year GDQ commentators stepped off the bench and got into the action themselves. Kungfufruitcup, whose voice you’ve heard reading donation messages for years, wowed everyone with nearly an hour of VR lightsaber box deflecting. Like the Celeste run, it involved the entire body, not just the thumbs. Just ten minutes of it looked exhausting. We tip our hats to you, she of the orange pigtails.
Our award for Funniest Commentators go to the people playing the Horror Games Block. Both FEAR and Carrion had some hilarious hosts who lightened up their morbid game choices considerably.
THIS person beat Super Mario 64 entirely blindfolded! He also got all the way to the last Bowser fight with just 16 stars. Turns out that’s all you need, and you don’t even need sight.
This year’s Kaizo Mario Hack: Super Orb Bros, built on SMB3 and embellished with yards of custom code. These hacks are fun to watch but we wouldn’t last a second attempting to play them.
This time we didn’t just get a Mario hack, we got the first Donkey Kong Country 2 hack to ever appear at GDQ. If you thought DKC2 was hard on its own, you haven’t seen anything yet.
The last time Final Fantasy VII was speedrun at GDQ, it took over six hours to play. That’s because they weren’t using the PC version. It’s considerably more buggy, and proper glitch exploitation will get you to the end scene in just under TWO hours.
Link’s Awakening is my favorite Zelda, and this time it was played through at GDQ TWICE, so I have to mention that. The first was with some restraint regarding glitches, the second was via TASBot and used everything, resulting in an end screen within five minutes.
eddaket caught them all in Pokemon Blue in just under two hours by basically breaking the game apart. He used an elaborate, complex trick that starts with MissingNo and ends with hundreds of precise moves, where one mistake or wrong D-pad push could crash the game. The commenters in this one are also hilarious.
The event wrapped up with the return of ZFG to the marathon — he has played Ocarina of Time several times for GDQ in the past, and each time he’s broken the game further. He returned to demonstrate the complete wizard he has become by overwriting the game’s own code USING the game itself, then utilizing his hacked powers to visit and vanquish every single dungeon boss in under an hour.
GDQ will be back this summer. An exact date has not been set, but it usually runs in late June.