Speedrunning and charities have gone hand in hand for quite some time now, mostly thanks to Games Done Quick and its various charity events. Awesome Games Done Quick 2020, which just finished, features various speedrunners getting together and playing random (some may even say awesome) games as quickly as they can. As they play, people can donate to the event, sometimes triggering special incentives that make the runs more interesting. For example, by hitting $4,000 during the run for Control, the runner let the audience pick which language to play the game in, and at $10,000 he showed off both the Ashtray Maze and Dyna-Mite!! music video segments, which are normally skipped in speedruns.
Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 raised $3.13 million donated by over 54,000 people. The money was donated to Prevent Cancer Foundation, which focuses on helping people catch cancer early and attempt to prevent it before it can even start.
With this event’s total, Games Done Quick has donated more than $25 million to several different charities, including Doctors Without Borders, AbleGamers, and more. And more events are on the way. Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 will be held from January 3-10, 2021, giving people another chance to watch some crazy speedruns and donate even more. If you don’t want to wait that long, Summer Games Done Quick 2020 will be held from June 21-28, 2020.
The actual donations are a wonderful feel-good story to start the year off, but another major highlight was the runs themselves, which featured not only incredible speedrunning talent but some crazy modifiers that really upped the stakes. Have you ever seen two people play Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! while using one controller and blindfolded? Think it’d be cool to watch a guy beat The Last of Us: Left Behind in five and a half minutes? Wondering how someone can beat all five single-player Fallout games in two and a half hours? No matter what you enjoy, there are certainly at least a few runs worth watching.
