The bi-annual speedrunning and record-breaking fest, Awesome Games Done Quick, is all about blazing through old and recent gaming classics as fast as possible, or to power through lengthy marathons, to entertain and impress gaming fans in person and via stream online, all while raising money for charity. And wow, during the most recent AGDQ the gamers and their fans sure found a way to do all of these things.
As of the time of this writing, over $1,550,000, through 39,000 plus donations, has been raised for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Over a week’s time, a lot of interesting and fun scenarios played themselves out on and off-camera. Digital Trends has compiled a list of five of these awesome things.
1.) Player taking on a game of invisible Tetris: “He’s not even playing at full speed here (to see him cut loose, watch this), in order to meet certain requirements to achieve the game’s highest rank and unlock a bonus level during the credits, which is the real feat: Invisible Tetris.
After each block is placed, it becomes invisible, leaving it up to the player to remember where it is. Kevin clearly has a pretty precise picture in his mind of what he’s building, as evidenced by a moment when he cries out about making a bad move, apparent to no one but himself.”
2.) Racing Through Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels: “Charming and extremely skillful, Big John does a great job of explaining what he’s doing as he goes, making this an excellent intro for speedrun neophytes.
The run is extremely impressive, particularly toward the end, and he even gets to the secret, post-credits level for not using any warps.”
3.)Speed-hacking Pokemon Red plugged into a Super Nintendo: “TASbot’s team set up Pokemon Red on a Super Game Boy cartridge converter plugged into a Super Nintendo. Then, using nothing but standard button inputs within the game, TASbot managed to take control of the game by rapidly moving and deleting objects in order to selectively re-write its memory. From there it hijacked the Super Game Boy, and then on to the Super Nintendo itself.Finally, as a coup de grace to demonstrate its mastery over the whole system, TASbot ran the live Twitch comment stream through the controller cable to display through the console, closing the loop and collapsing the whole livestream into a singularity of awesome.”
4.) Playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 64 blindfolded: “Runnerguy2489 literally backs up the boast of knowing a game so well that he could play it blindfolded by doing just that with the child dungeons of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 64 on the final day of the stream. He relies extensively on sound to provide the necessary feedback in order to navigate the the environment and enemies, using his sword like a blind person’s cane to feel his way through the game, often along the walls. The Z-trigger targeting feature, which was particularly necessary back in the day without a second joystick to control the camera, is also critical in hitting certain enemies and switches. It was not the fastest run of the week, but it was easily one of the most demanding and impressive overall.”
5.) The couple who games together stays together:“During a run of the N64 platformer Mischief Makers, runner Jackafur takes the opportunity of a lengthy cutscene to give a heartfelt thank you to the AGDQ community for supporting him last year during a difficult time, and then propose marriage to his fellow runner Kittyrawr. It’s a beautiful reminder of the ways in which games and the communities that form around them can bring people together.”
GameZone also called out the crazy-fast speedrun of Dark Souls 2: “Oginam absolutely wrecks Dark Souls 2 without any crazy glitches. To advance through the game, you normally have to beat the four main bosses and collect their souls in order to open a special shrine that allows you to advance to the later areas in the game. Oginam sidesteps this by collecting 1 million soul memory.]He then goes on to beat the game in just over an hour, clocking at 1:04:33, which is absolutely insane!”
GameZone goes on to mention Animal Crossing’s speedrun too: “Animal Crossing is a fascinating game. It’s so unique in a way that it doesn’t contain any sort of action, but rather it focuses on passive gameplay, where the player must live out their life in a village, while amassing money and eventually paying off the debt to their new house. …Speedrunner Forstrike has accomplished the daunting task of paying off the extremely high amount of Bells to that terrible Tom Nook in just under 45 minutes, a task that can take players months.”Check out the articles, and the videos associated with them too, if you want to see how this excellent speedrunning was done. For many more videos, the GDQArchive on YouTube covers a lot of the bases during AGDQ event!
