The Most HYPE Moments From Awesome Games Done Quick 2026

Awesome Games Done Quick 2026 ended a week ago and ended up raising over $2.5 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. When you’re trying to fight one of the world’s deadest diseases, why not have a little fun doing it? One solid week of speedrunning goodness was broadcast over the first full week of January on Twitch and the GDQ YouTube channel. Since watching the entire thing would literally take seven days (more if you plan on sleeping), we’ve pared the list down to our personal favorite runs…

Let’s do something unusual this time and begin our list with the very last run. It’s Adef, visible presence behind the scenes and in all the interstitial material, attempting a run of his own. Trying to complete Pokemon Emerald in a little over two hours is hard on its own, but imagine trying to do it with just one Pokemon, and it’s a Pokemon that keeps getting changed by the audience by popular vote. Naturally, Adef is forced to begin the game with a Magikarp. He then has to plow through eight Gym Leaders and the gang of Elites using, at various times, Shuckle, Ditto or (when the audience was feeling nice) Venusaur. Was it nice to torture this guy? Hey, it was for charity…

We observed that a large chunk of the games that ran this year were games that were released in the last twelve months. You can’t keep replaying the same games forever, of course, and those that returned needed to shake things up. I continue to be amazed by the new tricks that are brought in….like trying to run through Super Mario World BACKWARDS. It’s done with a hack that reorders the levels and has Mario run to the left.

Not the first Donkey Kong 64 Randomizer run we’ve spotlighted, probably not even the first race variant, but trust us — there’s a self-own moment toward the end that’s one of the funniest things we’ve seen in any GDQ.

The Awful Block returned this year with lamented luminaries like Egg, 12 Bananas, and 102 Dalmatians: Puppies To The Rescue. We haven’t had time to view all of them yet but we’ll highlight Joester’s playthrough of The Land Before Tune: Return To The Great Valley for the fact that it’s possible to simply float through every level. Looks ridiculous.

See how long you can last through this playthrough of American Truck Simulator where the players AND the couch commentators engage in the rowdiest, loudest Southern stereotypes they can possibly holler. Yee-haw!

Here’s the most popular, most awarded game of 2025 being shredded. I’m still playing through it and I really need to take in some of the tricks being used here, because bosses that took me an hour are felled in under two minutes.

You can imagine a game that encourages you to break it would be broken rather easily. Don’t blink or you’ll miss DK and Pauline’s entire descent to the planet core. Also, just so you know, they’re liars — they never pick up the zebra.

There was a bid war to decide which N64 Zelda game Bubzia would be playing: Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask. The twist? The chosen game had to be played blindfolded! The bidding was a close race, but Majora won out, and Bubzia had to figure out how to run precise glitches to skip to the end using only sound cues. THEN he had to beat Majora. I never knew the mask could shoot lasers from its eyes, because I’ve never had this much trouble with the final boss before. He usually goes down quickly.

Didn’t think I’d be highlighting Wind Waker again but apparently the game has now been broken to the point that Link can race across the sea by himself without the boat (or even the “Pausa”) and get all the way to the end cutscene in under a half hour.

The best run, I felt, was the 70-star Super Relay for Mario 64 in which SEVENTY PLAYERS took part. It was like an Avengers mashup of GDQ all-stars, each making a cameo for a few minutes. This run was held on the last day and wasn’t the last run, but it would’ve made for a magnificent finale.