Charity speedrunning marathon Awesome Games Done Quick 2019 starts today

I hope you didn’t have anything planned this week, because speedrunning extravaganza Awesome Games Done Quick starts today at 4:30pm GMT.

If you’ve never tuned in before, AGDQ is a weeklong, 24/7 marathon of games, all played as fast as possible, while streaming on Twitch and raising a whole shedload of cash for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. What’s not to like?

If you’re not a GMT user and (like me) are always confused by pesky timezones, you’re in luck – the schedule will adapt to suit your needs, and to reflect any lateness or earliness caused by especially long or short runs. It’s also where you can browse the full list of games that are being played, and don’t worry, if you miss something live on Twitch thanks to needing human things like “sleep,” the runs are archived on YouTube later.

This year things kick off with Hollow Knight, where you can expect about an hour and a half of incredibly skilled bug-bashing. Then, later on tonight, tune in to catch two runners race Portal in just 15 minutes. And on Wednesday, be sure to catch runner Halfcoordinated breeze through pretty platformer Semblance using just one hand.

I’m personally also very excited to see Celeste, though it’s taking place in the wee hours, around 2 o'clock on Friday morning. Curse timezones, bless VODs. Still, I might catch the tail end of the next showcase, a 100% completion run of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD, by virtue of it being six wonderfully glitchy hours long. (Listen, all games are PC games if you’re watching them from your PC.)

These schedule estimates are usually quite broad, but the Dark Souls III run is down to last precisely one hour, fifty-seven minutes, and thirty seconds, so now I want to watch that just to see how accurately the runner managed to predict it.

Finally, it’s always worth catching the very last run (and the finale afterwards). This is usually where there’s an absolute flood of last-minute donations, which is always nice to see - last year AGDQ ended up raising over $2.25 million (£1.77 million) for PCF.

If you just can’t wait for the fun to start, the GDQ Twitch is currently playing a rerun of last years’ final day, so go get hype!