The big speedrun marathon of the summer has just begun. Like the European Speedrunner Assembly a few weeks ago, SGDQ 2020 is online-only due to the pandemic, but I expect that it will still bring in a lot of money for Doctors Without Borders. Last summer hit a new donation record of $3.04 million USD, although that was surpassed by AGDQ 2020 last January.
If you’re new to speedrun charities – they schedule a 24-hour live stream with some of the worlds best video game players to beat video games under some set of constraints (such as difficulty, percent completion, or even blindfolding) as fast as possible. The stream collects donations telethon style and gives it to the selected charity (which is, as mentioned, Doctors Without Borders for SGDQ 2020).
Looking through the schedule, there is an interesting block of PC puzzle games (Portal, Portal 2, The Talos Principle, and Superliminal) on Monday afternoon. There are also two Tony Hawk games being played (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2x this evening and Tony Hawk’s Underground on Tuesday afternoon). Final Fantasy VII Remake will take up about seven hours of the Saturday graveyard shift. That day will also have a 100% run of Super Metroid, a blindfolded run of Super Smash Bros. 64, and a TASBot run of Super Mario 64 Shindou.
Games Done Quick tends to end with a long JRPG, and this one will be a five-hour run of Pokémon Shield.
It’s funny, I only seem to watch the TasBot’s these days. I guess I had my fill of human speed runs years ago