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Annual speedrunning marathon Summer Games Done Quick starts today

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Two of my favourite events of every year are the pair of Games Done Quick marathons that run in July and January. Awesome Games Done Quick is the Winter variety and this year managed to raise over one and a half million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Summer Games Done Quick starts tonight and looks to do the same for Doctors Without Borders with dozens of runners completing games for eight days straight.

You can see the full schedule of gameshere. Some highlights (all times are UK-based, but the schedule page will display your local time):

  • The very first run, Trihex on Yoshi’s Island. It’s rock hard, never boring and Trihex is the very best. It’s actually surprising to see the stream start out with this sort of heavy hitter.
  • Ori and the Blind Forest, 5:55 AM Wednesday. While I haven’t seen the actual route the runner takes, the nature of the game (difficult, skillful platformer) guarantees this will be entertaining.
  • Roundabout, 10:45 AM Thursday. A version of this run was shown on a pre-SGDQ hype stream a few weeks ago and it’s equal parts excellent and hilarious. Just managing to complete the game is challenge enough.
  • Oblivion and Fallout 3, 4:50 PM Friday. Bethesda games are broken enough for me on normal runs, so watching them done quickly is usually a mess of flight, clipping and characters appearing where they shouldn’t.
  • Dark Souls II, 5:05 PM Saturday. I’ve been watching runs of this fairly regularly and I love them. Just the right length to be entertaining without being boring and a good combo of wacky bugs and skillful play.

There’s likely many more of your favourite games on the list that I don’t know well enough, don’t enjoy or aren’t on PC so didn’t get mentioned above.

You can watch the stream here from around 6pm:

The speedrun subreddit always puts in a good show of supporting the event and creates an archive of all the runs that can be watched immediately after they’re finished. There’s also the official donation tracker, a must-look for anyone who enjoys watching numbers go up or those interested in the prizes they can win by donating.

While you wait for it to go live, here’s one of the best moments from this year’s AGDQ when some incredibly good Tetris players decided to show off their skills (skip to about the hour and ten mark for the really crazy stuff):