The Most HYPE Moments From Summer Games Done Quick 2019
THREE MILLION DOLLARS! Summer Games Done Quick shattered their previous record late last night (which was 2.5 million, set at AGDQ just six months ago). The video game charity speedrunning event pulled in $3,004,039 for Doctors Without Borders by the time the feed was shut off, and when the final count is made it may be higher. Even more remarkable: that extra million was generated entirely within the last day of the marathon.
It was a very fruitful week for great speedruns as well. Since watching them all would take seven whole days of your time, we’ve pared the playlist down to the defining moments. Don’t miss these:
It’s one thing to play a game…..it’s another to pull it off blindfolded, and even more impressive to do this for over an hour and beat the entire thing. Runner zallard did this with Punch-Out, and became the true underdog champion.
The Resident Evil 2 remake is barely old enough to be teething, and yet here it is being torn apart already. The audience is half the fun in this run, yelling every time Claire Redfield just barely misses getting tackled by another Licker zombie from behind a hallway corner.
This next one is rather long, but it’s the zany commentary from Keizaron and his friends that makes this run-through of Pokemon Crystal memorable.
The fact that this GDQ featured a playthrough of a Shrek game could be a joke in itself, but the real punchline comes when you see it in motion. Shrek flails around like a maniac, performs a series of “gather the animal” missions, and has to solve puzzles by farting on them. It’s truly surreal, but it was actually topped by the game that came after it…
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mort The Chicken, released for the PS1 in 2000. A donation incentive was met to keep all the cutscenes in the playthrough, and it’s a very good thing that happened. This run wouldn’t have been half as fun (or half as long) without the strange, limited-animation skits that occur between the levels (and their dialogue is actually quite sharp).
It’s been a while since we saw a great Super Mario World hack at GDQ. GrandPooBear and the other masters came roaring back with a custom kaizo hack made exclusively for the event. They took turns in a relay race trying to topple a merciless platformer, and the faces of each runner appeared onscreen, in-game, indicating when their turns were.
That wasn’t the end either; it was just the opening act to an entire block of Kaizo Mario Hacks:
Another returning favorite….the TASBot!
Your jaw will drop as the TASBot absolutely rips Mario Kart Wii apart, making insane jumps and taking shortcuts you thought were impossible. This run is just twelve minutes long, but you’ll be on the edge of your seat the whole time.
If that wasn’t enough, thanks to another donation incentive, TASBot got to return a second time to run through Celeste. There are some rooms the bot races through in less than a second. Beat THAT time!
Randomizers are becoming a GDQ tradition. This year a randomized version of Zelda 1 made for an entertaining race between JamEvil and fcoughlin.
Breath of the Wild has been at GDQ before, but a lot has changed in speedrunning the game. It’s now possible to pull off clipping and speeding tricks that reduce the trip to Ganon to just 33 minutes.
Finally, not all the races were nail-biters, but this Banjo-Kazooie Jiggy-off is pretty much a neck-and-neck competition throughout its entire run, until Grunty’s Furnace Fun finally fells one of the contestants.