Awesome / Games Done Quick

aka: Awesome Games Done Quick

It's called Awesome Games Done Quick for a reason, folks.

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• Let's get the obvious one out of the way: Over the course of thirteen years and thirty-three marathons, Speed Demos Archive and Speedruns Live have collected a grand total of over $45,000,000 (as of the end of GDQ Express 2023) in donations to several different charities. That alone deserves a round of applause and tons of respect.
• Hearing the room erupt in applause after a runner pulls off a difficult glitch, a boss gets beat before it even has a chance to fight, or a large donation comes in is always a highlight of a run.
• Any time someone beats their personal best time/sets a World Record during a run counts, too.
• All of the runners show some serious skill, but special mention has to go to halfcoordinated, who only has one functioning hand and still manages to be one of the top runners showcasing their skills at GDQ. His runs are advertised as "one-handed%", but as he points out, this is merely a publicity stunt: he actually runs in the normal categories alongside people with both hands.
• Rhythm Games generally result in some of the most hype moments in the current marathon, blasting awesome music into the viewer's ears while the runner shows off incredible skills and talent hitting notes and beats, including playing some of the hardest charts of the featured game.

GDQ events

AGDQ 2011

• UltraJMan pulling off a clutch fight against Mother Brain.

AGDQ 2014

• AGDQ 2014 had two fantastic Punch-Out!! achievements:
  • Sinister1 reprised his 2013 attempt at completing the original Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! for the NES while blindfolded, which he started attempting in 2012. In 2012, he was bested by Bald Bull. In 2013, he finally defeats Bald Bull, but gets bested by the Piston Honda rematch. In 2014, he beats the second Honda fight and eventually makes it all the way to Tyson himself.
  • Along the way, Sinister attempts to exploit a frame-perfect counterpunch against Don Flamenco. Practice makes... well, you get the picture.
• Immediately after this run, Zallard1 tackles Super Punch-Out!! for the SNES (again, blindfolded). He finishes the game with only a single KO against Narcis Prince. The donation tracker sums it up quite succinctly:

  "Y'know, we can't make entire runs the highlight reel. You know that, right?"

  • Zallard1's fight against Gabby Jay definitely counts—not because of any particular difficulty, but because Zallard1 sets the stage beautifully for the upcoming fights by perfectly stating the time it took him to win the match down to the hundredth of a second.
    [Gabby Jay drops onto the canvas at 0'07"49 seconds.]
    Zallard1: So that should be like, a 0'07"49, I think.
• During DNTN31's Mario Kart 64 speedrun at AGDQ 2014, a donation incentive to play Toad's Turnpike from Extra GP went unmet by the end... or so the runners thought. During the F-Zero speedrun that began immediately after, it was announced the donation incentive was met at the very last minute, with a donation of $10,000. DNTN31 came back and blew it away.
• The entirety of CGN's F-Zero GX run must be seen to be believed. When a room full of speedrunners call you "a human TAS", you know you're good. The entire run strikes a flawless balance between the skill of CGN's masterful performance and the hilarity of Naegleria's increasingly high blood pressure, making it easily one of the best runs of AGDQ 2014.
  • The moment that really stands out is in his playthrough of Chapter 8, where he gives Deathborn a twenty-six second head start and still wins. Handily.
  • 2013's F-Zero runner Yoshifan wasn't kidding when he said CGN would blow his record (and everyone else) away...
  • During Chapter 5, one couch member says that he will donate $40 if CGN skips one of the capsules in the chapter (thus making it borderline impossible to complete due to the time limit and lack of energy). CGN says he'll give it a try. The time limit is 40 seconds, after which he blows up and fails. What was his finish time? 0'39"159. He completed the level with less than a second to spare.
• The ending of Bizmuth's run of Minecraft. Not only did he slay the Ender Dragon, his character died shortly after—and Bizmuth got the World Record, to boot.
• The Tool-Assisted Speedrun block ends with Masterjun's Super Mario World run. It goes into the Yoshi's Island 2 level, glitches out the game a bit, and then...well, two YouTubers said it best:
  "People say that some runners "break games". Nonono, that's not breaking a game. THIS is breaking a game."
  "I think you meant rewrite the fabric of existence within the game."
  • Essentially, he was able to program two simple games (with a menu and ending screen) into memory via the controller ports ^note by simulating 2 MultiTaps (8 controllers). His post on tasvideos.org and this article have more information.
  • The best part is he didn't have time to explain to everyone what was about to happen. The run had just been completed the previous day and hadn't even been posted on tasvideos.org yet.
• The Super Metroid race between Garrison, Ivan, Krauser, and Zoast. The drama starts with Garrison's run ending halfway through the race and doesn't let up much afterwards. Ivan and Zoast are neck-and-neck for much of the race, Krauser tries to mount a fierce comeback by being the only player to nail an extremely difficult trick, and in the end, Ivan beats Zoast by just shy of one second. The race is still considered to this day to be the bar by which all other GDQ races are judged.
• The final game of AGDQ 2014 is Chrono Trigger. The donation total stands at just under $850,000. The marathon has already surpassed expectations—almost double the previous AGDQ—but they decide to aim for one meeeeeeelion dollars anyway "because why not". Can the community pull together and make it in the 5 and a half hours remaining? They do. And the crowd goes wild.
  WONDERSHOT!!
• Molotov's bonus stream run of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade after the disappointing run of the other Fire Emblem run where he easily manipulates the Random Number God to his bidding.

SGDQ 2014

• One of the runs is a so-called "mystery game", and the first arcade title ever shown at a Games Done Quick. That game is none other than Ninja Baseball Bat Man... with four players. The crowd goes wild upon the game's full reveal.
  Estimate: Amazing

AGDQ 2015

• In the TAS block, the mystery game is revealed to be Super Mario World. Considering what happened a year ago, there's no way anyone could top that, right? Wrong. They fulfilled last year's goal of coding a perfectly playable Super Mario Bros. — a few graphical glitches and All-Stars music notwithstanding — and played through the first stage.
  • Super Mario World was followed by Pokemon Red, which was plugged into a Super Game Boy that was itself plugged into the same SNES. A memory corruption glitch is set up, memory is manipulated, the bot ASSUMES DIRECT CONTROL...and then the game screen turns into a chat window. After some fiddling, it turns out to be the live Twitch chat feed—complete with emoticons. Yes, you read that right: "Pokémon Plays Twitch." Hilarity Ensues.
    DwangoAC: We took over Pokémon Red. Then we took over the Super Game Boy. Then we took over the entire Super Nintendo. Then we started streaming Twitch chat directly through the controller cables.
    Announcer: I just got, like, 20 donations going, "What?" ...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how TASBot wins the Internet.
  • You can read an article about both of these TASBot runs here.
  • They set it up again before the last three runs of the marathon. Even more hilarity ensued.
    Do what Twitch chat wants.
    TASbot: "NO."
• Jackafur proposes to his girlfriend on-stream, with 76,000 people watching, during the Mischief Makers credits roll. She said yes!!
• During the Final Fantasy VII "New Game+" category run, they exploit a disc swap glitch, to move from an early game point straight to the Northern Crater sequence, completely skipping Aerith's canon death scene, and having her be there as one of the characters that manages to help Cloud defeat Sephiroth. Nobody dies today...
• Kitaru, KevinDDR, colour_thief, and Qlex destroy the Tetris: The Grand Master series, known as the test of Tetris ability amongst many who have heard of/played it. Viewers who hadn't were completely mindblown by just how far the four runners pushed the limits of tetromino-stacking. Among their highlights:
  • Kitaru nearly tops out in an early section in TGM2 Master Mode, and not only makes a recovery, but also gets the RE(covery) medal^note Obtained by having at least 150 blocks in the 10x20 playing field, then clearing out blocks until 70 or less remain. and goes on to finish with an S9 rank. As one viewer put it:
    "the thing that makes AGDQ more fun to watch than youtube is exactly what just happened, people can choke away runs and do the opposite"
  • Kitaru, again, completing the "Secret Grade" challenge in TGM3—that is, forming a ">" sign with holes in a stack that covers the entire playfield.^note The ">" challenge is an Ascended Meme in Japan; in the earlier days of arcade Tetris (specifically Sega's 1988 version), bored players who capped it out would try various challenges, the ">" sign being one of them.
  • KevinDDR in TGM3 Master mode performing a Master M (the second highest rank) run live and demonstrating the infamous "invisible Tetris" credits section.^note Master M is the highest rank that can be rewarded without first getting and passing the Grand Master Promotional Exam, which requires 4 prior GM level performances within the previous 7 runs. The requirements for the GM rank include a perfect run until the "invisible roll" and then obtaining 6 additional rank increases during the invisible roll. To put the difficulty of gaining ranks in invisible roll in perspective, If KevinDDR had cleared even one line fewer in the staff roll, he would've only obtained a Master O rank.
  • Kevin, again, getting to the level 1100^note Levels in TGM are done differently than in other Tetris games; the level counter increases by 1 with each piece, and also increases with each line cleared, with TGM 3 adding 4 levels for a triple and 6 levels for a Tetris. Each section comprises 100 levels; when the player reaches x99, they must clear a line to level up. section of Shirase in TGM3, showing how ridiculously fast the mode gets once the level counter hits four digits, to say nothing of the game dishing out bracket blocks.
  • CT and Kitaru playing TGM2 Doubles mode to top things off. Notably, one of the two is behind by about 40 levels when the other hits the goal of level 300^note In Doubles, if one player reaches 300 but the other hasn't, the player who has gets stuck at instant-drop speeds, as the game's way of urging the other player to finish and both players to synchronize their finishes as closely as possible.. They still make it.
• The Ninja Gaiden Trilogy relay race at AGDQ 2015 may be one of the best video game races of all time. Both teams prove their complete knowledge of all three NES Ninja Gaiden titles and remain neck-and-neck through the whole thing, and the winning team finishes less than two seconds ahead.
• AGDQ 2015's "Save/Kill the Animals" incentive in Super Metroid, per usual, got a ton of money poured into it—over $200,000, in fact. Each option garnered over $100,000 through the course of the marathon, and in the last 40 seconds before cutoff, Save got a single, anonymous donation of $10,000, stealing the win with a comment of "Get Rekt—Save the Animals".
• The fact that Kaizo Mario World was speedran for the event. Granted, it was an Any% run, but the guy did it in 24 minutes 36 seconds.
• The Vanquish speedrun was done using only one hand.^note The runner, halfcoordinated, has a disease which weakens part of his body, which forces him to play one-handed.
• That $1.03 million raised in AGDQ 2014 was surpassed in AGDQ 2015 by the grand total of $1.55 million.

SGDQ 2015

• The TGM crew is back!
  • This time, they brought along SQR and KAN, two of the best TGM players from Japan who took the time and money to travel all the way to the United States to be featured in front of thousands of viewers.
  • Normally, when it comes to Japan-released games, Japanese players are typically of higher skill than Western ones, resulting in the stereotype that Japanese players are automatically superior to Western players. However, this stereotype was defied for three segments: The Doubles round (KevinDDR and TWF vs. KAN and SQR) Shirase of all game modes (KevinDDR vs. KAN; although KAN got to where he topped out quicker, Kevin managed to get about 30-40 levels above him), and TGM 3 Versus (KevinDDR vs. KAN).
  • Kitaru and SQR playing Doubles...solo, against each other. SQR finishes, but unfortunately Kitaru comes up one level short on both sides from completion.
  • KAN demonstrating a Master M run on TGM 3.
  • Ichiro Mihara, vice president of Arika and executive producer of the TGM series, donating during the TGM segment.
  • It says something about the popularity of this segment when the live audience room reached standing room only.
• Near the end of the Metroid Prime: Hunters run, Shasta ends up at extremely low health while fighting the final boss. He jumps from the top of the arena to get the last shot with the Omega Cannon, killing Gorea and himself, and the win is still counted.
• For a non-speedrun example, the staff somehow managed to get good video out of an actual Apple ][ for the sake of a joke 5-minute Oregon Trail speedrun.
• Awesome and a bit of heartwarming: Henneko's speedrun of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was going very poorly, but the runner kept powering through it, cracking jokes and trying to keep a positive attitude going. A lot of people donated out of pity for the run, but it was still all very good-natured; in the end, everybody around him gave him a massive group hug for getting through a clearly stressing speedrun.
• I Wanna Be The Boshy runner Witwix said he'd donate $30 per death (and $50 per boss death) with Ray Narvaez Jr and the Yetee agreeing to match it. They ended up having to donate over $7,500 from that agreement, with Witwix even dying on purpose so they'd donate more.
• For the Chrono Trigger run at the end of SGDQ 2015, donators could put their money towards a "Wondershot" incentive. When the goal was met for the incentive, runners Essentia and Puwexil had to try landing the final blow on Lavos's final form with Lucca's Wondershot (a weapon that deals out a random amount of damage with every hit) to complete the game. After getting Lavos's final form down to the necessary point, the runners pray that their attack isn't a "Blundershot". Their prayers are answered.
  WONDERSHOT!!
• The EarthBound speedrun by Aurilliux, even despite one mistake during the Final Boss, was a masterclass in RNG manipulation and could feasibly be called "How to make the Random Number God your bitch" instead.

AGDQ 2016

• The Super Mario Kart race between MD_Neo and KVD, in which the winner was decided by 12 frames (1/5th of a second)
• The three-way Super Mario 64 race, between the three top speedrunners of the game in the world: Puncayshun, Cheese05, and Simply. In the end, the difference between first and last place is less than five minutes.
  • Despite flubbing at the start, messing up several glitches and noticeably lagging behind, Simply takes the lead back for quite some time.
• The couch singing Disney songs during Kingdom Hearts. Each of the five winning songs had raised over $1,000 in the bid war!
• Returning from AGDQ2014 was blindfolded Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, except this time it was a race between Sinister1 and Zallard1. It ended up with both of them managing to beat Mike Tyson.
• The Majora's Mask 100% run. It lasted five and a half hours, and had four different runners - MajinPhil, fullgrowngaming, thiefbug, and Trevperson - alternating controls for each quarter of the run, showing off all sorts of crazy glitches and skips. It results in them almost fully hundred-percenting the game in one three-day cycle.
  • One particularly amazing moment: in an almost sixteen-year-old game, with a very heavily dedicated speedrunning and glitch-finding community, these four accidentally discovered a brand new glitch (rolling as Goron Link into a bridge post at one part of Snowhead caused them to bounce into the side wall, go out of bounds, and void back to the entrance). The glitch itself wasn't helpful and cost them a couple seconds, but they made it pretty clear they didn't care, because it was awesome.
  • After suffering some bad RNG^*Random number generation; basically, random stuff that's out of their control, such as movement of some NPCs, they get particularly good RNG at the dog race. They pick up a dog, who has a positive thought, and enter him into the race, which he wins. This is their first time attempting it, by the way, when they had expected to be at it for a while due to it being That One Sidequest.
  • And how does the run end? With them facing the final boss, Majora... all together, holding the same controller, each one operating one button or the analog stick... and blindfolded. They did it flawlessly, barring getting hit a couple times which didn't matter.
• TASbot managing to outdo itself once again by turning Super Mario World into Super Mario Maker. And if this wasn't enough, he allowed Twitch chat to control it à la Twitch Plays Pokémon. And then it broke the game, because the cursor scrolled too far up, causing the game to write garbage data to itself when an object is placed.
• During the StepMania showcase, one of the songs played, "300", is introduced by the commentators with a Dramatic Pause:
  Now this is... [Beat] ...a speed song...
• The Super Mario Maker blind race showcase was quite impressive overall, but one particular moment is one player clearing a NSMB-style level requiring a series of 1-block wall jumps on the first try.
  Dram runs Kaizo. He's like, "3-frame window? Feh!"

SGDQ 2016

• The Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze run. Already a phenomenal speed game on it own, six of its top speedrunners split into two teams (Team Canada and Team USA) to do a relay race. Aside from a few mistakes, the runners perform fantastically, and in the end, Team Canada wins by a mere 30 seconds after lagging behind during World 5. Highlights:
  • Michael_Goldfish doing his "Bad Manners" strat; taking an early hit on Blurry Flurry (a rocketbarrel level) and proceeding to finish the level without a scratch. Note that there is no reason to do this aside from showing that you have the balls to do so. MooMooAkai is no slouch either, managing to nab just about every collectible during the rocketbarrel section.
  • At the end, both runners manage to defeat Lord Fredrik in the least amount of cycles possible.
• The Catherine speedrun by Ghoul02, in which he runs through Babel while controlling two characters at once. He manages to do nearly flawlessly while providing active commentary. Note that the second controller he used was a fightstick. It works.
• The blindfolded Symphony of the Night run. Re-read that again, just in case you failed to understand; THE BLINDFOLDED SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT RUN. As if that wasn't enough, before doing his blindfolded Symphony run, Romscout performed a Low% Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow run that ended in a way that could very well be called the new definition of "clench."
• Momodora: Reverie. Halfcoordinated. Insane difficulty. 'Nuff said.
• A Super Mario World speedrun? Yawn. Low percent? Alright. Low percent small Mario only, meaning no powerups or Yoshi? Intrigued. The person running it is, as of the event, 15 years old? Holy shit. He got it in 16 minutes 19 seconds.
• The usual Super Metroid race took a turn for the dramatic when not one, not two, but three of the four contestants died during the race, and the leader dying to Mother Brain at that. This left the underdog runner Behemoth87 a chance to shine and take the win when he was previously trailing behind by over a solid 30 seconds from the second runner-up!
• Right before the last run of the event started, they announced one last donation incentive: surpass the final donation total from SGDQ 2015 and they'd set up a bonus 4-player 70 star race of Super Mario 64. And they surpassed it with flying colors!
• During the Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) run by tripl3ag3nt, he accidentally discovered an entirely new glitch: using the cinematic camera during a wall-hopping sequence got Sonic softlocked into a permanent spinning animation in mid-air. tripl3ag3nt does note that the glitch cost him a sub-one hour time, but he doesn't care, because it was awesome.

AGDQ 2017

• The Shovel Knight race between Smaugy and Munchakoopas, in which both runners show off new techniques and use incredibly dangerous skips, ended with both runners finishing the game within six seconds of each other.
• The Ninja Gaiden pacifist run race, which required both players to not swing their sword at all outside of boss fights, meaning no killing any enemy Mook or picking up a single power up. Instead they had to utilize precision jumps and damage boosts to make it through the game. Both players in the race of the first title ended up beating the game while one of the racers went on to do a pacifist run of the second game immediately after.
• The Super Mario Sunshine race between PangaeaPanga, StrongmanLin, AverageTrey, and BounceyBoy is one for the books as, for the most part, everyone remained within 1 Shine of each other. 1st place won with a time of 1:17:55 with last place just over a minute behind at 1:19:12! It would have been even closer had 4th not taken a death against Bowser, but the crowd rallied to cheer him on.
• During the Awful Games block, authorblues achieved a world record in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. His time was 17:50, over 12 minutes better than the estimate.
• Right before Dark Souls III, the commentators table decides to showcase the prizes for the final bidwar, featuring an insane amount of cool, exclusive stuff supplied by Bandai Namco themselves in exchange for a hefty minimum bid of $125. The cost did not deter people, and over the course of 10 minutes over $50000 was raised, and bids were being placed so fast that the donation tracker crashed.
• SHATTERING AGDQ 2015's donation record by amassing over two million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation just before the Undertale run. The moment the tracker started getting close, the entire live audience got up and began cheering the donations on, leading to uproarious applause when the tracker ticked over to $2 million.
  • Everdraed, the man who created Photoshop Flowey arrived on Skype right after the battle ended, expressing both admiration for the speedrun community, and shocked disbelief at the glitches used in the run. He then tells everyone to enjoy the game however they like, to let no one tell you how to play.
  • Everdraed mentioned that in the last few days before the game came out, he found a glitch that he nearly left in, because it would be an absolute Game-Breaker in a speedrun. Then he decided to take it out anyway, knowing that future speedrunners would find something else that the devs never considered. He was completely right.
  • The Undertale run itself came after the intense Super Metroid Race, where the audience was forced to stay quiet near the end, possibly due to the race being very close between Behemoth and Zoasty. Here, TGH manages to make the game exciting to watch and gets the crowd cheering during each of the final bosses of the game, such as: copying Omega Flowey's distorted hitsounds whenever he gets hit, chanting "HUG THE GOAT!" after the fight with Asriel, the tracker hitting $2.2 million right as the hug happens, and finally the buttclenching battle against Sans, which he does almost flawlessly, only taking 2 hits during the whole fight.
• Along with AGDQ 2017 breaking the $2 million mark, nearly $1.4 million of it was raised all on the final day. Plus the fact that the Super Metroid "Save or Kill the Animals" bidwar raised about a third of the whole donations!

SGDQ 2017

• The Freedom Planet run, where Fladervy pulls off several pixel-precise cycles speeding across warping platforms, showing off frame-perfect divekicks to fly over things he shouldn't be able to, and several times impressed commentator Succinct and Punchy, a technical player in his own right that's rarely impressed by much. In a few places Fladervy even improvises a few tricks nobody even knew could be done, coming in a minute-and-a-half above the world record on a marathon run, and got through the Dreadbox.
• The Low% Ice Race of Super Metroid quickly fell apart when two of the runners died twelve minutes in, leaving Zoast to have to carry the run solo. Despite having to use mainly the Ice Beam, which is fairly weak as a beam upgrade by itself even with charged shots, and only having a handful of missiles and three energy tanks due to being allowed to pick up 14 items overall, he manages to clear the entire rest of the game without death. It especially hits the tension when his fight with Mother Brain comes down to a hair's breadth, where a single hit would cause him to be killed by the cutscene rather than get saved, and ultimately survives by a sliver to deliver some Catharsis Factor handily.
• The Super Panga World Rom Hack run, which Dodechehedron did in less than half the time estimate, beating his pre-marathon personal best by five minutes.^note He set a new World Record of 26 minutes in the practice room the night before the run, too.
• Halfcoordinated beat the A route of NieR: Automata, something that takes about 10 hours, in two hours—with only one usable hand!
• During a Data Org demonstration, Bl00dyBizkitz does the Sephiroth fight in Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix at Level One, using the Sweet Memories Keyblade (the weakest Keyblade in the game), with no armor or accessories, dodge-rolling Sephiroth's One-Hit Kill attack each time^note an attack you're expected to use the Action Command to avoid; it can be dodge-rolled, but being off by a frame is instant death... and wins. Effortlessly.

HRDQ

• Kanis nailed all but one wrong warp in Donkey Kong Country 2 on the first try; the only mistake came in Parrot Chute Panic. He finished the game in 40 minutes, 44 seconds.

AGDQ 2018

• Skavenger216 returns to be the debut runner for Blaster Master Zero for the Nintendo Switch.^note The first run on the Nintendo Switch for Games Done Quick
• Sumichu's brilliant rendition of "Snake Eater". Even the most mischievous members of Twitch Chat were willing to praise it. Listen to it here.
• During the final minutes of the Super Mario 3D World run, one bidder bid $4,000 literally in the last seconds of the incentive bids for Toad to win, when they were just about to use Luigi, who was the winner until that bid came in, surprising the runner and the entire commentary team.
• The Dragon Warrior I run, which was accomplished in 27 minutes.
  • Notably, the run largely relied on RNG manipulation, which normally is done in Tool Assisted Speedruns, with a real person doing it, knowing practically the exact moment to move in order to actually make random encounters predictable.
• The Strider tutorial, featuring an experienced player teaching a newbie how to effectively speedrun the original NES game, inspired several viewers to try themselves. One, Aldriel, discovered a major new skip. As a direct result of the tutorial, a new Any% world record was set. As of January 12, 2018, the top 5 times all come from the days after the tutorial, a stunning success.
• dwangoAC officially quit GDQ after AGDQ 2017, only for an incentive bid to be done for TASbot to return to do a session with Super Monkey Ball, making it effectively akin to a 10-Minute Retirement.
• Zallard1 plays Punch-Out and Super Punch-Out at the same time. With one controller. Beats them both in less than 25 minutes, and gets a first round TKO on Tyson after a 1.19 first knockdown; thought to be nearly impossible.

SGDQ 2018

• Mr. Shasta's run of Metroid: Samus Returns saw him try to achieve a floor glitch that shaves 45 minutes off of the run time. But he had trouble getting it due to not playing on his own 3DS. He remains persistent & humble, however, and eventually wins the crowd over to his side. And when he finally gets it nearly 7 minutes later, the response is euphoric.
• TheMexicanRunner's 100% Completion run of Cuphead showcasing how one of the most difficult games in recent memory being utterly destroyed while TMR himself suffered only one death. He got a well-deserved standing ovation after completing the run.
  • Studio MDHR even gave him a shoutout with new promotional artwork.
• In the Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa run, EnchantressOfNumbers established a new World Record.
• Kosmic completed Super Mario Bros. in less than seven minutes. Not a big deal for a speedrunner, right? Well, Kosmic did that run with one hand.
• Linkus7 ran The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD with a large number of skips and item slides that allowed him to essentially go zooming past large portions of the game, but the largest was a GDQ first: the Barrier Skip. The barrier at the sunken Hyrule is meant to be opened through upwards to about three extra hours of run time, but recent discoveries allowed those running the HD version of the game to skip it and jump straight to endgame with a run time hitting just over an hour now. Even better, despite running on a TV he wasn't familiar with, Linkus managed to accomplish this on his first try with no hang-up.
• MONTYvsTHEWORLD's run of the notoriously challenging Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, done in less than three minutes. It's so under the estimate that MONTY attempts a second run using the remaining dedicated time he still has (emphasis on "attempts").
• Sumichu returned to the mic for another singing performance, this time delivering a beautiful rendition of "Aria de Mezzo Caraterre" (the opera song) during the event-ending Final Fantasy VI run.
  • Near the end of the run, a donation train started at the 6:15:00 mark where everyone on Twitch would donate five dollars. Within twenty minutes they broke two million.
• The TASbot run of Celeste stunned viewers and commentators alike (one of the latter was part of the dev team)...and then it made the C-Side levels look like child's play.
  CovertMuffin: [Repeatedly throughout the run] No way!
• In a email addressed to all donators, Doctors Without Borders has announced SGDQ is their biggest fundraiser of the year.

AGDQ 2019

• Linkus7's run of The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD was a perfect storm of awesome: with a skilled runner, a hyped crowd, and excellent commentators. What truly elevated it, though, was the runner inventing his own donation incentive mid-run - The total funds raised had just crossed $900K, and he said he'd have Link take a selfie with Ganondorf during the final boss fight if they broke $1m. Donations began pouring in to try to meet this; while they didn't break $1m Linkus saw the enthusiasm and lowered the bar to $50,000, which was easily surpassed by the end of the run. Then, even after he was exhausted by completing a six-hour run and going over-estimate due to bad luck, he still put on a glitch demonstration to keep the crowd entertained because the next runner on the schedule was running late.
• The fortitude PJ had to complete a run of Mohawk and Headphone Jack, a game that uses the Super Nintendo's Mode 7 to nauseating proportions, at least $2000 was donated because of viewers who promised to donate $50 every time they threw up from motion sickness. That's at least 40 instances of vomiting. It's not an easy game to watch, so being able to run it is quite an achievement.
  • Not to mention, due to the above and how poorly the game drops in quality on video sites like Twitch or YouTube, a speedrun of the game had been rejected by GDQ staff at least thirteen times. The fact staff finally allowed the game on the schedule was nothing short of a miracle.
  • The game itself gets one. Most games in Awful Block are notoriously shoddy in quality and programming, and even most of the big-budget titles have a lot of exploitable glaring flaws. But as is noted multiple times by the runner and the couch, Mohawk and Headphone Jack is legitimately well-programmed and has few glitches or skips, has dynamic map loading for a SNES game, and only has minor lag. This is especially notable since PJ has been known for breaking games in half, intentionally and unintentionally.
• Crossing over with Funny Moments, early on in the Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze race between Kruncha, michael_goldfish, and Spikevegeta, a couple of donations come in containing lyrics of the DK Rap, with Spike asking for people to just submit the entire thing for Punchy (the announcer) to recite, though he puts it off after admitting to not be familiar with it. However, after about 40 minutes and some cursory Google searches to get the rhythm, Punchy manages to get most of it down, much to the delight of everyone in the crowd.
• As if TheMexicanRunner's previous 100% run of Cuphead at SGDQ 2018 wasn't amazing enough, this marathon saw him complete an "All S+P Grades" run of the game — a category that requires Pacifist Runs on all of the Run & Gun levels and destroying every boss while parrying three attacks, finishing with a maxed out super meter, without getting hit. The standing ovation and cheers, well-deserved for so utterly conquering one of the hardest games in recent memory, lasted a good long while.
• Similarly to the Final Fantasy VI run at SGDQ 2018, at the 3-hour mark of Bayleef's run of Super Mario Odyssey's Darker Side category, a donation train started, with the intent of getting as many people in Twitch chat as possible to donate $5. It began at roughly $1.85 million, and within twenty minutes, right before the end of the run, they smashed through the milestone of $2 million, with the donation counter ticking up at an incredibly fast rate the entire time. This was also enough to utterly smash the donation incentive of getting Bayleef to run the Dark Side Boss Rush (while wearing the Invisibility Hat), which was less than 50% of the way to its goal before the train started.
• The co-op run of N++ by AND4H and Krankdud turned out to be a surprise hit, both for the sheer amount of coordination and synergy between the runners, as well as the non-stop, yet incredibly concise and engaging commentary by Mithical9 on the couch, impressively commentating for nearly the entire 26.5 minutes with no need for donations or dead air. To cap it all off, the duo end up setting a world record, incidentally marking Krankdud's second WR in the same event (the other being for Mega Man Zero 2, which was also commentated on by Mitchical9).
• Dr. Fatbody puts on a speed run clinic on the original Sonic the Hedgehog, casually pulling off frame-perfect maneuvers while keeping hype levels high throughout the entire run.

SGDQ 2019

• Dowolf plays Half-Minute Hero, an extremely fast game, while giving extremely-fast commentary.
• Following up from his past blindfolded Punch-Out!! runs, Zallard1 obliterated his PB of Punch Out Wii blindfolded, never going beyond round 1 of any of the bouts.
• Keizaron's run of Pokémon Crystal alone had $101,776 raised on top of seven incentives met (the highest-earning run of the week outside of Saturday in GDQ's history!), partly because of a donation train based on the Pokédex numbers of donators' favorite Pokémon, leading to a lot of relatively large donations when Pokemon past the first few generations were brought up. The train even returned briefly for the Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! run on the final day.
• On the Let's Go! Eevee run, Eddaket found a shiny Raticate with full odds! He did eventually give it to Professor Oak for Candy since the OoT bonus run hadn't been met though.
• ColonelFatso's run of Mega Man 3 nails on the first try several difficult skips including a frame-perfect trick in Doc Shadow that involves touching a spike the frame the screen transitions, despawning the music. The run finished deathless in 34 minutes and 11 seconds.
• At the end of it all, SGDQ 2019 utterly shattered every GDQ record total to date— in the ending cutscenes of the closing Chrono Trigger run, the total broke three million dollars for Medécins Sans Frontières. When the big $3M threshold was passed, the crowd was on its feet, roaring in ecstatic applause and cheering. Supplemental awesome comes from the fact that this run alone pulled in at least $800K, since the total at the previous run's conclusion was hovering around $2.2M — still nothing to sneeze at.

GDQx 2019

• zallard1 and Hootey race Super Punch-Out!! blindfolded, both finishing in about 20 minutes. The lead was constantly changing, making for a phenomenal and exciting race that showed off both players' skill and the horrible luck that can plague an SPO blindfolded run.
• Orcastraw runs a Shrine Rush mod for Breath of the Wild, and sets both their new personal best and world record time.
• Edobean beating her previous SGDQ 2016 time in Tetris Attack by over two minutes, with half the hands. Bowser in particular was only a 15 second round!

AGDQ 2020

• Sinister1 and zallard1 teamed up for quite possibly the craziest Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! run yet: two players, sharing one controller, and both of them are blindfolded. And, somehow, they pulled it off without getting knocked down once, taking Tyson down in round 2.
• Gusto doing a one credit clear of Mushihimesama-Futari on Ultra difficulty. For added context, he was playing on the harder 1.01 version and only a handful of people were recorded beating it - and he went on to do it live. He did start with 5 lives instead of 3 just in case he made any mistakes that would otherwise end the run, but he still demonstrates a lot of surgery-class precision and excellent strategies with the ultra-dense Bullet Hell and makes crowd-pleasing use of bullet cancelling (aka Big Juicy Cancels).
• The inclusion of the fanmade game Clone Hero (a rhythm game based off of the Guitar Hero series). Runner FrostedGH showcased just how skilled he is at the game, with several prominent streamers in the CH community donating to the cause, a showcase of various charts, including a Modchart (described as "making the game do things it was never meant to do"); culminating in Frosted facing off against the legendary song Through The Fire And Flames, which just barely met its allotted incentive goal in the showcase's 45 min run.
• The finale of the marathon: A run of a Super Metroid ROM Hack known as Super Metroid Impossible, one intended to only be playable via robots instead of humans (essentially the Super Metroid equivalent of Kaizo Mario World). And yet, veteran runner Oatsngoats managed to complete it on-stage with minimal trouble (aside from a few deaths on Ridley, whose defeat itself was a Moment of Awesome). For context, Oats mentioned at the beginning of the run that only one other person in the world had a time on the speedrun.com leaderboard (at least at the time). Just the fact that this run occured at a GDQ event in the first place is simply incredible.

Corona Relief Done Quick

• Happyf333tz's showcase of Pump It Up is a sight to behold. He plays on a genuine arcade machine which takes up most of the room he's playing in, most songs he plays are co-op which requires inputs from both dance pads, which sometimes requires him to do splits, while arrows are flying by at mach speed requiring some fancy footwork and during all this F333tz is providing his own commentary. No wonder he has to catch his breath between songs.

SGDQ 2020 Online

• SGDQ 2020 happening at all is one of these for the crew, commentators, and runners, considering they had to convert the entire thing to an online format due to the coronavirus then pulled it off without too many hitches. The fact many of the runners are streamers already certainly helped.
• Lizstar, the runner for Hypnospace Outlaw, set a new World Record during her run. Nobody, runner included, realized it as it was happening and it was only pointed out later during the recap.
• Happyf333tz returns from CRDQ for another Pump it Up showcase, going through a full hour of high-level songs and getting multiple S, SS, and even some SSS grades, ultimately cumulating in a Level D28 Chart (played across both sides), which he completes with an A rank.^note While his lifebar does bottom out, Pump It Up doesn't fail a player unless it happens with Stage Break on (it wasn't here) or they get 50 consecutive misses. An "A" is the highest letter grade possible with any misses (S and above require 0 misses - which to date has not been done on PARADOXX D28), and the only difference between a colored A and the broken grey A Happyf333tz got (which he explains earlier in the showcase) is whether the lifebar bottoms out.

AGDQ 2021 Online

• One of the first runs of the marathon was a very, very close race of Donkey Kong Country. Runners Eazinn and DadLovesBeer were neck-and-neck the entire run until a choke on the final non-boss level occurred on Eazinn's end. To say the chat was floored by the two runners being almost in sync and the lead gap never getting longer than only a few seconds would be an understatement.
• Day two of the marathon featured the Sonic the Hedgehog block, bringing two back to back Any% world records for both Sonic the Hedgehog's 2013 mobile Updated Re-release (playing as Tails) and Sonic 3 & Knuckles' Fan Remake Angel Island Revisited.
• The 100% Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island run by by Calco2 executes a very, very tough sequence of repeat flutters to skip a lengthy Blarggwich segment in 5-4, perfectly guiding Yoshi and firing eggs to pick up every item along the way.
• Gymnast86 decides to flex on Demise at the end of his The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword run by pulling out a blindfold. There was no incentive for this; it was simply done for style points.
• Blindfolded runs of games are nothing new to the Games Done Quick scene, except this time it was Super Mario 64's turn to receive a (16-star) blindfolded run. Yes, a full, expansive 3D platformer, ran form start to finish, blindfolded. And even with not being able to see anything and rely only on audio cues, runner Bubzia was able to successfully finish the game roughly sixteen minutes under estimate.
• PeekingBoo's speedrun of C-Side levels Celeste with dance pads was absolutely ridiculous, as he also managed to get all the Golden Strawberries! What's also amazing about the run is that he performed the speedrun and commentated at the same time, never missing a beat.
• Mitchflowerpower's run of a very difficult Super Mario Bros 3. hack called Super Orb Bros., for which he had given an estimated clear time of 40 minutes. Mitch beat it live in under half of that time, and got a new world record to boot. The previous world record? 36 minutes.

SGDQ 2021 Online

• The Paper Mario 64 "Stop 'N' Swop" run is one of the most broken runs in all of GDQ, using Stale Reference Manipulation in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to trigger a credits warp in Paper Mario.
• On the second and third days of the marathon, TheMexicanRunner ran Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection and the original Battletoads respectively. The former, an already difficult game, had its difficulty elevated from the run's original setting. The latter would add a requirement to play the Turbo Tunnel level blindfolded, relying solely on audio cues to progress. Both of these run changes were due to donation incentives, and TheMexicanRunner would complete both in flying colors.
• The Golden Sun: The Lost Age run by Plexa had a successful donation incentive to battle the game's Superboss Dullahan. Using an out-of-bounds trick to reach Dullahan quickly and with lower levels than intended, Plexa uses careful planning and some AI manipulation to defeat the boss in only 13 turns.
• Immediately following the above run was havrd's run of browser-based geography guessing game Geoguessr. Take that in. A browser-based geography guessing game, on Games Done Quick. Not only that, but havrd makes it all work, being able to decode which country he is dropped at in the world and get all perfect scores by picking the precise spawns, even when the third through fifth spawns throw him through several loops due to their difficulty.
• Day 5 presented Dage4's thrilling run of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, full of complex speed tricks, many successful skips to cut huge chunks out of the stages, and phasing through walls to skip directly to the Goal Rings of multiple levels (notably Eternal Engine, Crazy Gadget, and Final Rush). To say the Twitch audience was riled up would be an understatement.
• The same day that featured the above Sonic Adventure 2 run would conclude in bombastic fashion with the Pokémon Black and White race with PulseEffects and Swiftalu. While the run would desync several times, it would resync by the time the two runners reach the final boss versus Ghetsis. Armed with only a Stoutland, the runners would stomp his entire team into the ground and finish the game only five seconds apart from each other. It would go on to become one of the closest races in Games Done Quick history.
• Bubzia returned from AGDQ 2021 to tackle another blindfolded run of Super Mario 64. Unlike the last blindfolded Mario 64 run, this one would go without performing any tricks or exploits. In other words, Bubzia's goal is to get 70 stars and win the game relying only on audio cues. The result? Barely beating sub 1 hour and 50 minutes with a final time and new personal best of 1:49:59, well under the 2:15:00 estimate. The steam chat went wild after the run's conclusion and the current host was unable to process just how amazing the run was that he had to run off and catch his breath in the intermission.

AGDQ 2022 Online

• A year following the very close Donkey Kong Country race at AGDQ 2021, day 1 of AGDQ 2022 featured a 4-way race of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest. The top two runners of the race, Tonkotsu and V0oid, crossed the finish line with a very close 1.2 second difference in their final times of 39:39.5 and 39:40.7 respectively.
• hypnoshark's run of Crash Team Racing was filled with great execution on a technical standpoint, hitting every notable speed trick and time-saving skip with very few errors. Special mention goes to the Papu's Pyramid race, where hypnoshark quickly collects a mask form a pack of crates and drives across a thin brick path immediately at the start of the race to achieve an extremely short lap time on the first lap.
• Jaxler destroying the world record time for Pumpkin Jack by almost three minutes, landing nearly every trick on the first or second attempt.
• In the randomized Pokémon Crystal run on Day 4, Keizaron gets an epic Throw the Dog a Bone moment by finishing 30 minutes under the run's estimate and coming in first place in the race between him, 360Chrism, and SheNanagans.
• The bonus incentive for Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories was to obtain the Blue Eyes White Dragon card with an estimate set for 15 minutes. Runner skybilz battles Seto Kaiba and obtains the card after only a single battle, taking one minute and 43 seconds total.
• InsertLogic, the runner for Kena: Bridge of Spirits, apologized after the run for getting a rocky start and making a few mistakes, only for the announcer to inform him that because was playing on Hard difficulty due to a donation incentive he actually set the world record in his category.
• Five words: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Blindfolded.
• SpootyBiscuit's NotITG showcase is an absolute marathon of a run, clocking in at an hour and 20 minutes' worth of some of the most Interface Screw-laden charts in any rhythm game, all played on a dancepad with no breaks in between. Spooty's play is excellent throughout, and he even manages to pull off a Full Combo on the 6-minute-long final boss medley at the end of it all!
  • Near the end of the exhibition, the audience hits a donation goal to have him play through a collection of extra-difficult stages. Spooty, however, decides to take things one step further and picks out even harder ones than he had agreed to, including charts believed to be impossible on a dancepad. He passes every single one of them. Even the couch (who created most of the charts he was playing) were left in awe.
    Spooty: If the mod scale is a 20-point scale, then why am I playing a 22?
• Public donations by the end of the event totaled over $3.1 million, but then the massive additions from Twitch subscriptions, chat bits, and corporate sponsors was added to the donation tracker... and it soared over $3.4 million to a grand total of $3,416,729, beating the previous record held by AGDQ 2020 and sending the chat into a nuclear explosion of hype that continued to burn well past the credits.

SGDQ 2022

• There is $3000 left on a $225,000 goal to get one more performance out of TASBot. The donation tracker is moving steadily, but not quickly enough to beat the clock. Then the legendary main theme of the pinball classic Black Knight 2000, a fan favorite of the GDQ playlist, kicks in, and the live audience begins to clap with the beat, encouraging Twitch chat to follow the Black Knight's demands and "give [GDQ] your money." As the song ticks to a fadeout, the counter for the goal slams upwards to $226,000 and keeps going.
• Speaking of TASBot, said donation goal was worth the trouble. The TASBot demonstration of 2022 is initially referred to as the Ocarina of Time Beta Showcase, featuring cut content from the game via Arbitrary Code Execution... before gradually going off the rails as the true nature of the TAS becomes evident—it is a full ROMHack made out of Arbitrary Code Execution, and showcases the power of it and the Nintendo 64 together to pull off some incredibly stunning payloads that truly have to be seen to be believed. These payloads include, but are not limited to:
  • A custom questline, complete with implementing Majora's Mask's mask powers into Ocarina of Time and its own cutscene at the end.
  • Bringing various playground rumors to life, such as beating the Running Man in his race and (much later) acquiring the Triforce.
  • A wholly custom boss fight against the Running Man, complete with custom attacks and even its own reward for doing so.
  • Custom music—both for the Ocarina and as standard background audio. (Credits reveal SiIvaGunner of all people were behind the soundtrack!)
  • Being able to finally acquire the Triforce with the hopes of millions of players across 23 years combined; yes, it's a wholly custom item as well with its own details, and reveals the true name of the run--Triforce%.
  • Rendering custom models in real-time with Breath of the Wild-styled player characters and terrain, alongside a cutscene for it to boot.
  • As a grand finale, with the help of TASBot, connecting to the internet and printing messages from Twitch Chat, in real time, in the aforementioned custom 3D space, changing the world around it live, still in-engine.
  • The kicker? This TAS has its own credits sequence, painstakingly thanking everyone who helped with it, and in of itself containing custom assets.
  • And it must be mentioned again: with the exception of the music, various lines of dialogue, and a few of the models (namely Link and Zelda in the Breath of the Wild art style), none of this was added to the game externally. Nothing here was added in advance with a ROMHack; it's all either used and unused assets in the base cartridge reconstructed with ACE, or written and inserted on the fly with said ACE. If it weren't for the presence of TASBot and The Reveal at the end, you'd really believe this wasn't running off of the original Ocarina of Time we all know.
• On the final day of the event, Oatngoats topping his run of Super Metroid Impossible with a run of Super Metroid Kaizo, a ROM Hack even more difficult than Impossible in which there are no E-Tanks, finishing a hack where one hit almost always means death with only 9 deaths.
• The final milestone of $3 million, which would unlock a final Elden Ring any% run, remains unfulfilled as the All Remembrances run ends. Remembering the earlier effect it had, the tech team deliberately plays Black Knight 2000 once again, followed up by a rock remix of the Ducktales Moon Theme, in an effort to push the viewers one last time before the network is forced to go off the air. The tracker began to accelerate wildly, and with seemingly only minutes to spare, the hosts and even the runner stalling as hard as they could, the tracker finally breached three million, with the chat, the audience, and basically everyone ABSOLUTELY EXPLODING as the final milestone was achieved, ensuring one final run for the event.

AGDQ 2023 Online

• During a four way race of Super Mario Galaxy 2, Jhay set a new world record in a highly competitive game by two seconds.

SGDQ 2023

• Three words: Kaizo. Monkey. Ball. This difficult set of custom Super Monkey Ball 2 levels was tackled by IkeSMB and with a few exceptions, all 70 stages are completed in one shot without any fallouts or restarts.
• Shockwve's Gunfire Reborn run is incredibly fast, and on pace to finish in half the estimate, only to die to the final boss. The producer tells him to keep going and the salty runback is an equally fast blitz; allowing Shockwve to fundamentally complete two runs under one estimate minus that dang final boss again. And all on the hardest difficulty too!

Flame Fatales 2023

• The The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Restricted Major Glitches run not only skipped the Moon Pearl, but beat Ganon with half a heart left.

AGDQ 2024

• CarcinogenSDA pulls off a legendary feat in Resident Evil 2 (Remake) by performing a Hardcore run taking absolutely no non-mandatory damage.

GDQ Hotfix Shows

Mercy Kill

• During the Grand Poo World 2 run in a 2021 episode, Amethyst_Rocks defeated the challenging final Bowser fight (which is completely random) without dying once despite not having played the game for a year.

Thats Never Happened Before

• During a 2022 showcase of Undertale glitches and the like, Shayy demonstrates most of the glitches that require optimal spacing or placement, sometimes requiring frame-perfect inputs with minimal trouble and in quick succession. On top of that, Shayy explains what a "TASGORE" does: the player is required to input 36 frame-perfect commands during the fight with Asgore using the Frying Pan weapon, and for the sake of demonstration fails the second 4-block sequence of inputs on purpose. He then goes on to nail the remaining 28 inputs, something that is considered one of it not the most difficult part of the entire speedrun. The entire run must be seen to be believed.

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