One of gaming’s many niche sub-cultures revolves around the art of “speedrunning” - which, as it sounds, is the act of playing and completing a game as fast as humanly possible, often through the use of manipulating glitches, errors, and other fun quirks discovered over years of playing (and replaying) a game.
Since 2010, the speedrunning community has held a twice-yearly charity event called Games Done Quick, gathering dozens of speedrunning streamers, masters, and commentators together for a 24-hour a day, week-long event held on the popular streaming platform Twitch. The first Games Done Quick, held from January 1-3 2010, raised $10,532 for CARE; it was only three years later, at Awesome Games Done Quick in January 2014, that GDQ raised over $1 million during a single event.
In the years since, GDQ has raised over $34 million for charities, including the Prevent Cancer Foundation, the Organisation for Autism Research, and Doctors Without Borders, the beneficiary of this month’s Summer Games Done Quick marathon, which raised $2.9 million from over 22,000 individual donors. This was the 3rd highest total ever - despite the entire event taking place virtually from each individual speedrunner’s home.
During the week, viewers got to see 153 different events, like a blindfolded speedrun of Super Mario 64, a race between multiple speedrunners playing Pokemon Black/White, and the show-closing hard mode run of Kingdom Hearts II. What is even better than seeing a game broken in fun, strange ways? Seeing games broken for a good cause, something GDQ continues to do in new, impressive ways with each charity marathon.
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