SGDQ clocked in $2.9 million donations, a personal best for their online events
Now that it's over, here are some neat runs you might have missed
After a big week of speedy button mashing and tricky hacks it's time for SGDQ to take a well-earned rest. The charity marathon raised over $2.9 million (about £2 million) for Doctors Without Borders, which the GDQ organisers say is a new record for their online events. It pulled in a total of 40,351 donations from 22,640 actual donors with a median donation amount of $25. If you didn't catch the marathon live, you can still catch a few fantastic runs from the week down here.
One particularly neat trick happened during the Styx: Shards Of Darkness speedrun from early in the marathon. I talked about it a bit more last week, but you can spot the clip right here. Speedrunner "Tohelot" shows off how getting out of bounds in Styx actually allows runners to exploit a set of developer tools in the game.
"The database holds all the information about the level objectives and we just go on top of the buttons and press 'yeah, we did the thing' and go to the next level," Tohelot explains. That's a trick I sure wish I had for chores in real life. You can spot the entire Styx run over on YouTube.
For those in the mood for something more classic, the Sonic Adventure 2: Battle speedrun performed by "Dage4" was a really swell watch all around thanks to some well-performed tricks and very supportive commentators. It features the very triumphant quote "I'm gaming right now. I'm not gonna lie. I am gaming," after Dage4 is congratulated by commentators for an impressive time on a level. Fellow speedrunners hyping one another up in commentary and in donation messages is always a major highlight of GDQ marathons in my mind. Always puts a smile on the mug.
Another run full of enthusiastic explanations and impressive tricks was the Shadow Of The Colossus run performed by "TikTak". I'd managed to forget that it was remastered on PS4, not PC, so you'll forgive me for including it just to show you a rather impressive physics jump. There were a lot of neat things to learn about SOTC during this speedrun but of course one of the flashiest tricks was my favorite. You can watch the rest of that run over here.
Those are the runs I can recommend firsthand at the moment. Still sitting on my watch list is the Black Mesa speedrun, which I imagine will be neat given how new the game is. I'm also looking forward to watching the Untitled Goose Game run, which proves you can still do wallhacks if you've got feathers instead of fingers. Make sure to catch the glitch exhibition following that speedrun for even more goosing around.
What about you lot? Did you spot any particularly nifty tricks? Did you donate this year? There's plenty of speedrunning to keep me fed until the next event.
Summer Games Done Quick ran from July 4 through July 11 this year, officially raising a total of $2,909,369.35 for Doctors Without Borders.
