Games Done Quick Raises $2,000,000 for Charity

Games Done Quick, the bi-annual speedrunning marathon, surpassed 2 million dollars in charitable donations for their chosen charity, Doctors Without Borders (Médicins Sans Frontierès.) The final tally was over 2.1 million, which surpasses last summer’s total of 1.7 million dollars, making it their most successful summer ever. Games Done Quick typically holds their events twice a year; Awesome Games Done Quick, in winter, and Summer Games Done Quick, in summer. The previous event, AGDQ, raised $2,294,612. Over 16 million has been raised across more than twenty marathons.

For those who are new to speedrunning, the goal for the players is to get through a game as fast as possible, sometimes with restrictions or strange parameters to make things more interesting. For example, using only one hand, playing two games at once, or playing blindfolded. Sometimes runners will compete in a race to see who can finish a game first, or even team up to complete a game. Being a charity event, there’s often donation goals that can be reached to play a specific game, activate a play condition, or name a player character. For instance, on Saturday, SGDQ reached a bid goal of $150,000 specifically put toward playing Super Mario Odyssey.

Games Done Quick streams their marathons on their Twitch channel. This year, the runners’ varied schedule included Iconoclasts, , Metroid: Samus Returns, Cuphead, Pepsiman, Celeste, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy, Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 ReMix, A Hat in Time, and Pet the Pup at the Party, among many other new and old games. Overall, there were 177 different games played during SGDQ. They ended the marathon with a glitchless 100% (all characters and espers) run of Final Fantasy VI for the Super Nintendo.

If you missed any of the runs or just want to watch them again, Games Done Quick archives their streams on their YouTube channel, as well as their Twitch channel.