The Summer Nerd Olympics are almost upon us. Every six months, the best and brightest in gaming assemble under the Games Done Quick banner to demolish games extra-fast and raise heaving sacks of cash for good causes. This Sunday, the speedster swarm will be descending on Bloomington, Minnesota to destroy games as you know it, all in the name of supporting Doctors Without Borders. As usual, the whole thing will be streamed live on Twitch (and archived on YouTube)  and runs for an entire week, 24/7.

Below, find some of our must-watch picks from the full schedule.

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There are few things as momentous in the gaming calendar as Games Done Quick charity speedrun marathons, and the full broadcast schedule for this June’s upcoming Summer Games Done Quick event has just been published. Many of the world’s weirdest, most diverse and implausibly skilled players will congregate at the end of June to raise money for a good cause (in this case, the increasingly important Médecins Sans Frontières), and systematically tear dozens of games into tiny, glitchy shreds over the course of a week of non-stop speedrun showboating.

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Speedruns themselves can be mind-boggling, but it’s the community behind them that interests me the most. There’s an infectious joy that comes across in every video that’s come out of Awesome Games Done Quick, the annual week-long charity speedrunning event that wrapped up over the weekend. It’s an event that provides the triple-whammy of heart warming camaraderie, entertaining speedruns and a whopping $2,269,209.96 so far for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. That’s more than $50,000 over last year’s total and donations are still rolling in – you can chip in here if you’re so inclined.

I’ve collected some of the best runs for ya after the jump.

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The Games Done Quick events are among my favourite parts of the gaming calendar. Showmanship, absurd levels of skill and a mountain of cash raised for good charitable causes for a week straight, twice a year. The winter event – Awesome Games Done Quick – starts this afternoon at 4:30 GMT and if you’ve never tuned in to watch one of these live on Twitch (or recorded on YouTube), then you’re missing out

While traditionally console-centric, recent years have seen a far higher percentage of PC titles (especially smaller indie games) demolished live, and the schedule for this coming week’s event looks to be continuing that trend.

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Seven days of speedrunning have started, as the livestreamed run-o-rama Summer Games Done Quick returned on Sunday. Runners will blaze through 140 games during this week to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and we can watch the whole shebang on Twitch. I’m a virtual potterer myself, happy to amble through games staring at digital trees and toilets, but I’m always hugely impressed by Games Done Quick. Some players speed by with pure skill, mastering how a game is meant to be played, and that’s great. It’s also great when skill goes into making the game do things it’s not meant to, carefully breaking it to cut corners. Read the rest of this entry »

And they’re off! Those zippy, glitchy speedrunners are away in this year’s Awesome Games Done Quick, a solid week of non-stop speedrunning livestreamed to raise money for charity. Gasp at their mastery of games! Coo at their exploitation of glitches! Groan at how many rubbish NES platformers they play! Wince at their banter! But mostly, genuinely, it’s impressive how speedrunners know their games inside-out and back-to-front. As ever, they’re playing a grab bag of games from all systems, including a good number of PC games. AGDQ 2017 kicked off yesterday and run 24/7 until Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

Speedrunning charity event Summer Games Done Quick started on Sunday evening, blazing through almost 200 games over the next week to raise money for Doctors Without Borders. And to show off m@d skillz, obvs. It’s all livestreamed on Twitch. It seems to have a few more PC games than usual, or at least in bigger clumps, including Dark Forces, System Shock, Daggerfall, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Dustforce, Diablo II, and Typing of the Dead. A few of the games are in a special Humble Bundle too.

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There are a few levels I’d say I know like the back of my hand, but top speedrunners are the sort who can not only draw their gamehand perfectly from memory, they’ve probably also whipped out a scalpel and peeled back their gameskin to examine the workings of the underlying muscles and tendons. This metaphor is falling apart, so I’ll say: kids, don’t play with scalpels. Instead, for the next week you can marvel at dozens of speedrunners demonstrating their mastery of 150-ish games during the latest livestreamed speedrun-o-rama Awesome Games Done Quick. It starts this afternoon!

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Summer is here, I’m told, though this weekend I had to buy a hat to keep off this Scottish rain. Still, the festive spirit of summer is alive and well in Summer Games Done Quick, the week-long livestreamed celebration of speedrunning games and raising money for Doctors Without Borders. The event kicked off yesterday, and will end on Sunday.

The schedule includes a good number of PC games with a few oddball choices, the PC lineup including Hotline Miami 2, Unreal, Super Noah’s Ark 3D, Octodad: Dadliest Catch in co-op, and Minecraft. It’s all streaming night and day on Twitch and archived on YouTube if you want to catch up on something.

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Stop! Slow down! The time for speed is over. Now it’s time to amble, potter, and slouch it up. Charity speedrun-livestream-o-rama Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 wrapped up on Sunday after a week of folks completing games awfully quickly. They glitched, they tricked, they optimised, they skipped, they shaved, and they raised $1,545,916.03 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Lawks! The streams are saved so you can still pick up a few tips from folks zipping through everything from oldies like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and William Shatner’s TekWar to the shiny newness of Shovel Knight and Dark Souls II.

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And they’re off! Thwapping their glitchsteeds with millisecond-perfect timing, the speedrunners are away. Charity livestream-o-speedrun-a-rama Awesome Games Done Quick has returned once again, kicking off yesterday and running until Saturday. They’ll be zipping through games all day and all night, including PC games from Shovel Knight to an Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind run aiming to complete all main quests in 45 minutes. I don’t know where else you’ll find someone raising money for a cancer charity by playing William Shatner’s TekWar.

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In case you’ve been living under a livestream-shielded rock for the last three years, Games Done Quick is a pair of charity speedrunning marathons ran every year by the community. The larger of the two is Awesome Games Done Quick, taking place in January. It’s a massive event, gathering dozens of speedrunners, requiring months of preperation and watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers over the a full week. More importantly, it makes an absolutely ridiculous amount of money for charity, pulling just over a cool million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation at AGDQ 2014 alone. Over on the Speed Demos Archives forums, Event Director Mike Uyama laid out the finalised schedule for 2015 and it’s a doozy.

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The Games Done Quick gang have launched another week-long festival of speedrunning, bringing top runners together to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières. Some are impressive for playing the game flawlessly, perfectly timing every jump and shot, but my favourites are those which have felt around the underlying code and systems for weakness and exploits. They’ve probed for holes in the scripting, scratched at levels to expose glitches, and explored the weirdness of game physics, and runners explain these tricks while they play. That’s what fascinates me.

The livestreamed event started on Sunday and will run until Saturday, with a lineup of over 150 games including a System Shock 2 speedrun somehow aiming to finish it within 20 minutes. You can get some of the games they’re running cheap in a Humble Bundle too.

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