Summer Games Done Quick raises $2.3 million for Doctors Without Borders, and had some great speedruns
Here's a few of my favourite speedruns
The first fully digital Summer Games Done Quick is over, and they've managed to raise $2.3 million (about £1.7 million) for Doctors Without Borders. This is one of the highest amounts raised at a GDQ event, which is pretty respectable considering it had to move online this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But despite not being able to attend the event in person, the speedruns were still excellent, and we saw the event's very first VR run in Half-Life: Alyx.
If you haven't watched the VR run, please do. Most speedruns done in Source games are pretty entertaining, but watching runner "Buffet Time" occasionally sprint around in circles and crawl along the floor to get underneath the world in Half-Life: Alyx is something else.
Another that's well worth your time is the 'true ending' Baba Is You run. Speedrunner "Punchy" completes the (usually) 30-hour game in about 23 minutes. It's absolutely brain-melting and he has a godlike commentary speed to match the baffling speed at which he completes puzzles.
For the horror fans out there, Alien: Isolation run by "Drayax" is fab. To be fair, you don't actually see a huge amount of horror. There's one part where he just… teleports through a door while the Alien is trying to get him. If the folks on the Nostromo could've done that, Alien would have been a much shorter film.
I also really enjoyed this Hollow Knight race between runners "Pestilentbox2" and "fireb0rn". This is the sort of run that makes me want to try out speedrunning for myself, and the couch commentary is wonderful to boot.
There are so many more brilliant runs to catch up on, you can find all the VODs over on the Games Done Quick YouTube channel.
A bonus SGDQ stream went up yesterday on Twitch, too, that was intended to be the event's pre-show. There are five extra speedruns here that didn't quite make it to the main event. It's good fun, and you check it out below.
If you're already yearning for more speedy gameplay, the next speedrunning event to look out for is Fleet Fatales, which takes place between the 15th and 21st of November. Then the next big GDQ event, Awesome Games Done Quick, kicks off in the new year, running from the 3rd until the 10th of January.