Image via Twitter
Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) is a week long slumber party where some people beat all kinds of video games super fast while thousands more watch. Now in its ninth year, the marathon wrapped up early today after raising a record breaking $US2,263,093 ($2,860,330) for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
Beginning last Sunday with Crash Bandicoot 3 and finishing around 5:00am today with a run of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in which Anatomyz completed all of the main quests in just under four hours.
In addition to featuring lots of speedruns of different games, including lighting quick Any% attempts and longer ones in which players have to effectively 100% the game in question, there’s an elaborate donation system for spectators to interact with the runs while also raising money for a good cause.
Big THANK YOU to all the people participating in both the run by @GrandPOOBear and the TasBot Showcase!! Coming up is the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild run by @anatomyz_23 #AGDQ2018 pic.twitter.com/IblAuMCOmV
— Games Done Quick (@GamesDoneQuick) January 14, 2018
Donation totals for different people and organisations ran between a few bucks to over a hundred thousands dollars, with lots of people bidding on various things like whether a runner has to defeat bosses in reverse order or seven what to name characters in a game like Secret of Evermore.
For example, by raising the $US125,000 ($157,988) required to meet one of the bonus game goals, spectators were able to replace one of the marathon’s final setup blocks with a run of the Super Mario World fan mod, Super Dram World 2.
Other donation categories are competitive, like one in which the option that raised more money, either saving or killing the Baby Yoshis in Super Dram World 2, would affect what Grandpoobear did while playing through the game.
@GamesDoneQuick Watching Link flying over Hyrule LIKE A BOSS, Mercenary Tao-style has been an absolute blast. #AGDQ2018 #GamesDrawnQuick #TLOZ #BreathoftheWild #DBZ pic.twitter.com/4dwPsDjFmf
— Juan Carlos Gómez (@JohnCGZ) January 14, 2018
The Breath of the Wild run also raised a ton of money. The audience spent almost $US70,000 ($88,473) on choosing the run’s language (English closely followed by German), $US147,112 ($185,935) toward the unmet goal of getting Anatomyz to ride a vehicle into the final boss fight, $US50,233 ($63,490) to get him to play it on Master Mode, and a whopping $US209,055 ($264,225) for naming Link;s horse (Rochefort followed closely by Yobby).
In the aftermath of the run the event’s organisers announced the next marathon, Summer Games Done Quick, will take place between June 24 and July 1. AGDQ has uploaded a bunch of videos of the individual runs to YouTube but you can also check out everything on Twitch by using this handy time-stamped list.
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3 responses to “Awesome Games Done Quick Raises Over $2.2 Million For Charity For The Second Year In A Row ”
One big thing is that they didn’t have the yearly Super Metroid run with the donation incentive to either Kill or save the animals, in previous years it has always brought in a tone of donations with last year having $400,233.46 towards saving and $394,106.30 for killing.
It was most likely not included due to the drama around it last year with the crowd making an obnoxious WAH noise that was funny a first but became annoying real fast
I glad that didn’t stop AGDQ for beating it’s previous years donation total 🙂
I missed all of it because my internet had to die on the day it started.
Interesting that despite complaints that the event has become too sanitised or corporationed or whatever, and even with lower viewer numbers (if the thing I saw was correct) the donations are as high as ever.
I mean its not like they could just say that they made $X.X in donations right?
Right?