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Summer GDQ's week of online-only speedruns start this weekend

Gotta go fast, online.

The couch may be gone and the crowd safely isolated at home, but that won't stop those pesky speedrunners from once again marathoning a whole lotta high-speed videogames. This year's entirely-online edition of Summer Games Done Quick races off this weekend, beginning a week of charity speedrunning tomorrow in support of Doctors Without Borders.

Like everything else this year, on-site plans for this year's Summer GDQ were postponed, and then scrapped in favour of taking the event wholly online, akin to the one-off Corona Relief Done Quick held back in April.

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This year's event is, understandably, a little scaled back from before. A look at the official SGDQ schedule reveals significantly fewer races, and a few notable games are missing outright (where are you, Titanfall 2?). That doesn't mean there aren't enough big runs to catch at this year's show, including Half-Life: Alyx' GDQ debut as a bonus game on Friday. There's also an actual Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II run on Thursday - but then, what's the point if you're not sneaking it inside an entirely separate Half-Life speedrun?.

On the other hand, this year's event makes room for a good amount of shorter, niche titles like melancholy Pac-Man-alike Eat Girl and geocities web adventure Hypnospace Outlaw - a game I struggle to even conceptualise being speedrun. As before, all funds raised at this year's events will go towards Doctors Without Borders. Last year's show raised a solid $3 million, setting a high bar to beat this time 'round.

Summer Games Done Quick kicks off with a run of Demon's Souls at 5pm BST tomorrow afternoon, and runs through 'til the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, August 23rd. You can catch the all the runs over on the Games Done Quick Twitch channel. Until then, why not get yourself in the mood for some sprints with our best bits from January's Awesome Games Done Quick?

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