Summer Games Done Quick: Watch Players Absolutely Destroy Every Game Ever
If you play video games with any frequency, you know what it’s like to have a backlog of unfinished titles staring you in the face. Well, here’s your chance to catch up on all those missed opportunities of the past, and with lightning speed. Summer Games Done Quick, an annual event where speedrunners come together and crush the life out of a particular set of video games in the fastest time possible, kicked off Sunday, July 26th, and continues throughout the week until the following Sunday, August 2nd.
What makes it so much better is that during the runs, donations are encouraged, all of which go to Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian-aid non-governmental organization that provides help to over 70 countries who are in need. Whenever you make a donation, you’re entered into a raffle to win prizes, usually specific to the game being run.
Hosted by Speed Demos Archive, Summer Games Done Quick is held in the Crowne Plaza hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota and broadcast live via Twitch. The event covers a wide array of games on classic and modern consoles, as well as PC (master race). The runners themselves are also a blast to watch, as they all have their own personalities to add to the mix as well as explanations to how they’re accomplishing the amazing feats that are taking place on screen.
The roots of the event tie back to January 2010, when the first Speed Demos Archive charity marathon was held. Over $10,000 was raised for CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere), and its success built the foundation for semi-annual marathons to come. Awesome Games Done Quick, the sister marathon held in the winter, occurred in January 2011, and Summer Games Done Quick took place in August of the same year. Since then, both marathons have been held on a regular schedule, and the amount of money raised each year has continued to increase substantially.
Approximately $1.75 million dollars was raised in 2014, and the event is well on track to beat that record yet again this year, as Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 already raised over $1.5 million alone in January.
They’ve also teamed up with The Yetee, a website dedicated to gaming shirts, posters, and more. Any of the shirts purchased from this link will donate three dollars of the cost to Doctors Without Borders.
Check out the schedule to see what games are coming up! Here are some that caught our attention: Mega Man X8 and X2, both of which are races to see who can complete the games faster; Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, proposed to be beaten in under an hour; a race for Super Mario Sunshine; Dark Souls II, with donation incentives for two players sharing one controller; and a co-op run of Chrono Trigger to close out the events.