Summer Games Done Quick 2019 announces June schedule
ORB!
Time to pencil in another week of sick days and sleepless nights, as the competitors and games for this year's Summer Games Done Quick have been announced, broadcasting from Bloomington, Minneapolis. The charity speedrunning marathon kicks off on 5pm BST on June 23rd, demolishing games at record pace around the clock until June 30th. As with their other summer events, they'll be raising fat sacks of money for Médecins Sans Frontières. While there's still time for last-minute changes, the show schedule is here, automatically adjusted to your local timezone.
Lots of classic PC stuff on show this year, with runner "KingDime" coming to trounce Final Doom: Evilution on Ultra-violence difficulty in under 55 minutes. Given that he holds the current world record (see the 38:45 run here), I doubt he'll have too much trouble when he does his run early on June 24th. Prey has become a regular fixture for the show, supplanting Deus Ex, and runner "LifeL1ke" reckons that they can do every main quest in under 1 hour 18 minutes. The Titanfall 2 speedrun is also going to be a spectacular watch, thanks to how fast a good player can move.
The part of the show I'm most looking forward to is a block I'm preemptively calling Strange Games Done Quick, starting at 5:30am (BST) on June 26th. They'll be springboarding off the surreal UFO ending of Silent Hill 3, diving into Big The Cat's fishing-based adventure from Sonic Adventure DX. It's then on to weirdness like claymation RPG Hylics, the DOS port of the original Castlevania and return to semi-normality with Clustertruck. It's blocks like this which give us the likes of Urban Yeti above, and often some of the most entertaining failures of the show.
There's some intriguingly new stuff in there too. The just-released The Textorcist will be featured, along with the intentionally janky Super Benbo Quest: Turbo Deluxe (see the trailer here) to be showcased. It's always great to see smaller, newer indie PC stuff given some time in the limelight. Not that the console classics (and recent gems) should be ignored either. The Tetris Effect showcase by HardDrop on June 28th is going to be 40 minutes (or less) of pure hypnotism and impossibly fast-moving hands. What games are you tuning in for?
SGDQ begins at 5pm BST on June 23rd. You can see the full schedule here, and the event's official page here. It'll be streaming primarily on the Games Done Quick Twitch channel, which also hosts bonus events like the Kusogrande Invitational, a blind bad games racing event where none of the contestants have played the game before. It's always good for a chuckle.