Summer Games Done Quick, a charity speedrun marathon that was back with an in-person event for the first time in a few years, was held between June 26-July 3 in Bloomington, Minnesota. And at the end of the week, once all the runs were done, the event had raised an enormous $3 million for charity.
The final tally was $3,021,310.49, all of which will be donated to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. When you add that to the $3.4 million that Awesome Games Done Quick raised earlier this year, which went to the Prevent Cancer Foundation, that is a lot of money people are parting with to see runners do some very cool shit with video games.
SGDQ 2022 was the first in-person GDQ event since the pandemic began back in early 2020, so it was awesome seeing a live crowd on-hand to support/react to all the action taking place. If you didn’t catch any of the action yourself, here are some highlights. We’ll start off with this incredible Ocarina of Time run, which beats the game quick, sure, but also does so much more:
And here’s a Pokémon Emerald run that involved four-player co-op, along with a randomiser that meant every time their Pokémon levelled up, it would randomly change into a different Pokémon. The result was absolute chaos:
This is a Super Mario Sunshine run that has ups, downs then ups again before it’s over:
And finally, here’s a Yakuza: Like a Dragon run that finished the entire game in less time than it took me to complete a couple of the tougher boss battles:
If you want to see more runs, or just pick one out of a game you’re particularly interested in, the organisers have recordings of every one of them on their YouTube page.