The Most HYPE Moments From Awesome Games Done Quick 2025

Our apologies this is being turned in so late, but to be honest, we still haven’t seen every AGDQ video this year — so this list could be updated later. The weeklong video game speedrunning event, which was held earlier this month, raised over $2,500,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Since it would literally take a week to watch everything, here are our favorite moments, embedded for your viewing pleasure.

“PAUSA” is no longer an element of Wind Waker speedrunning (if you know, you know). Recent glitch discoveries have made it possible to get all the way to Ganon in under an hour — and that’s what runner Linkus7 does, through a set of amazing tricks (warning: some of said tricks involve a lot of screen flashing).

Is Shenmue even a thing that can be speedrun? This game wants you to take your time and employs every trick to force you to. We must admit runner Maxylobes uses a mod trick here that lets him advance the game’s clock to allow certain events to happen without waiting. But other than that, he manages to complete the game in under three and a half hours.

Is he really playing New Super Mario Bros Wii on a PIANO?? ….Not exactly, but he is using unothodox controls (his feet) AND playing the game’s soundtrack at the same time, which is a feat in itself.

Could you play to the end of Super Mario 64 without pushing the Jump button? Not if you’re human…a TAS-bot has been programmed to take advantage of glitches humans can’t by entering hundreds of commands at rapid pace to get to the final Bowser battle without jumping of its own will even once.

The Awful Games Block returns with one of the emperors of the genre: Titus’s Superman 64! There is a hilarious option in the menu that lets you shrink the view screen, which runner BradHamar does to its smallest possible size. Alas, this is not the mode where you fly through a zillion rings, but it’s probably more interesting to watch that way.

Also from the Awful Games Block…we don’t want to spoil what this is about. Just click, watch, and trust us.

And of course we need Kaizo SMW hacks in a GDQ marathon. This year there were more than one!

Frozenflygone played the more recent Fresh Hops, and then lungfish3000 tackled one of the earliest kaizos in existence, the much harder Kaizo Mario World 3.

ZFG was given a nightmare of a Ocarina of Time randomizer in which the items required to complete the game were NOT guaranteed to be in convenient spots. And indeed they weren’t. But at least he got to play as Dampe.

Finally, Kusogrande Live! was a multi-day tournament speedrun where groups of people had to play random games chosen from the PS1 library. They had to wrap up with Irritating Stick, which entered the lineup at the last minute and was then miraculously chosen.