Games Done Quick is a 7-day, 24-hour-a-day gaming event and charity fundraiser held twice a year in different cities around the United States. The event has been held to benefit Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), a well-deserving charity, for this and the previous 3 summer events. The main show is focused on speedrunning video games, and is streamed around the clock on . But there's more to it than that.
5:34 PM DuckTales 2 (NES)
It's a seven-day event but I spent a single evening at SGDQ. I got there as a guy who goes by the handle NME was running through DuckTales 2 on NES. The setup is this: The speed runners and their commenters are on a platform, with the runner in front and the commenters behind them on a couch. They are all set up with headsets to talk to the audience, provide commentary on the game or exploits/tricks being used to go faster, or just joke around. Behind them, in front of the platform, is another couch and a few for spectators to sit on while they watch a TV that mirrors what people on Twitch see. To the sides of that couch are two large projector screens where the same is projected to the rest of the live audience sitting in the large conference room. This isn't the only room though, more on that later.
They were playing the Japanese version. Maybe it was faster? I missed the explanation.
As they're playing, either the player or the commenters (who generally also had speedrunning experience with the game) would comment on the game and what they were doing to go faster. There are many tricks that save seconds here and there, adding up to minutes. In this game in particular, NME would do certain things to despawn enemies off-screen, make very difficult jumps to avoid NPC conversations, and strategically sacrifice health by running into enemies. They seem to have studied the games they speedrun in great detail, even down to knowing exactly how many seconds each trick they perform shaves off the total time.
Practice Room and Table Gaming Room
There's more to Games Done Quick than the speedrunning main events. One room was dedicated to practicing speedruns for pros and amateurs alike. Near the door, World 9 Gaming set up a table where consoles and games could be checked out to practice or play on. There was also a private speedrun room for people who were doing a broadcast speedrun that needed to focus on practicing.
The practice room
These guys were competing against each other in, of all things, some SNES fishing game
Practicing Tetris: The Grand Master, note the bare arcade hardware being run on a PC power supply on the left
Check out your game and console here
Next to the practice room was the table games room, which I didn't take a picture of. People were playing a variety of games, including board games, dominoes, Magic:TG, and some stuff I didn't recognize.
Pinball
Pinball Joe (streaming pinball from SGDQ for the rest of the day) brought many pinball machines, all set to free play. It turns out I am a fan of pinball when they aren't eating my quarters! My favorite one to play was called The Getaway. It's the one he has his streaming camera on. Also there was The Walking Dead, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, Iron Man, and a couple others that were bad so they were put in a corner.
Arcade
There were also a good bundle of arcade machines on freeplay. Many old, some new. I had a blast drifting in Outrun 2. There was also a beat game I'd never seen before called Jubeat. There were at least two people who were extremely good at it. I was amazed to see an Ikaruga Sega Naomi cabinet there! But it was playing Heavy Metal: Geomatrix instead. :(
6:06 PM Hook (SNES)
A speedrunner calling himself LivelyRaccoon did this one. One thing that stood out to me about this run was the detailed knowledge of speedrunners on the function of random number generators (RNG) in the games they run. They know which bosses use randomness and how to maximize the chance of beating them as fast as possible. The knowledge and skill people gain on these old, mostly forgotten games is amazing.
7:28 PM Tetris Attack (SNES)
This one was a 4-way speedrunner race through a puzzle game! Competitors Darkwing Duck, FFR Pro 21, Edobean, CardsOfTheHeart raced through the single player mode of Tetris Attack on very hard difficulty. It was interesting to watch, each player had incredible skill with this old game. In a post-game interview I think every one of them said they grew up with it. The final boss, Bowser, gave each player a lot of trouble. Finally CardsOfTheHeart put him away and claimed victory.
8:01 PM Final Doom: The Plutonia Experiment
The games moved from classic console to classic PC FPSs, starting with THE classic, DOOM. More specifically, The Plutonia Experiment WAD. This was played by Dime, seemingly a very skilled Doom player. I didn't know you could use rocket jumps in Doom until now. He also used a trick to slip between very skinny gaps to bypass needing to get keys or do level puzzles. He explained it that these gaps were the smallest possible in the editor, and they also just happened to be the same unit-width as the hitbox for the player character, "Doom guy." It was still very tricky to get through them.
8:39 PM Ultimate Doom
Thanks to a lofty fundraising goal being reached ($30,000 just for this I think), Ultimate Doom was played as well. Again it was Dime, and he played through all episodes of Doom and Doom 2 with extreme speed. It's really hard to believe I watched the entire two games go down so quickly.
9:41 PM Hexen
A guy by the name of Cubeface tackled Hexen, an old school dark fantasy FPS with some RPG elements based on the Doom engine. This game is an extra challenge for speedrunning, as it has three character classes to choose from that all have different attributes (like movement speed) and weapons/abilities. The character class he played was voted on by donators, with the highest character donation tally being chosen. They voted for the Cleric class, which he explained was a good balance for a speedrun.
10:28 PM System Shock
Fearful Ferret ran through System Shock, an amazing game that I'd never seen played before. It's a brilliantly designed cyberpunk RPG FPS that somehow came out in 1994. Way ahead of its time, I wish I had played it back then! Anyway, he explained the tricks he used, including being able to get through locked doors by taking advantage of the fact that the player's hitboxes are basically the legs and head. By crouching next to locked doors, and also next to walls slanted towards the player, he was able to clip through them by going into the menu, saving the game, and returning to the game. He also would frequently use the game's respawn points by accomplishing objectives and then throwing a grenade at his feet to respawn there with the full health he had when he set the point.
10:54 PM Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death
This game... I really wanted to watch this because I've heard it's absolutely ridiculous. And it is. Shaddex and DrTChops played Judge Dredd in co-op mode, in a speedrun they called "CO-OP JURY." This meant they did not skip any of the cutscenes, for the benefit of the audience. It's a really goofy game and it was cool to see it played live, and in co-op. One memorable exploit they used was that because a fall-death was only triggered after falling for a certain number of seconds, they were able to fall for a long time down to a much lower part of a level by entering and exiting the menu screen over and over, which reset the fall-time clock.
11:50 PM Deus Ex
Deus Ex is another one of those games that are legendary but I never played through. Heinki clearly has played this game a few times, as he was a master at it. He was also a hilarious and entertaining commenter as he played. One of his biggest tricks was to clip through doors by throwing grenades at his feet while immediately next to him. Another awesome trick he used was multiplying his character augmentations by going in menus and then exiting them repeatedly. Apparently the game adds the augmentation stats over and over again when this is done. This allowed him to do Matrix-like super jumps. He also had numerous specific tricks through all the levels and seemed to know the whole game extremely well. This was my favorite speedrun of the night, mainly because of Heinki's entertainer skills.
Because it was particularly good and funny, here's the youtube:
SGDQ Day 7
That was it for my night there. The event is still going on today! One of the more interesting things they are doing is TASbot runs. TAS stands for tool-assisted speedrun, meaning they hook up a computer to control the input to the game console. In the past, amazing exploits and feats have been accomplished, beyond getting the best possible time to beat a game. In 2014 some brilliant hackers were able to run arbitrary code in Super Mario World, programming Snake and Pong into the game as it ran on an actual SNES. Later they even managed to program Super Mario Bros (for NES!) into Super Mario World. So keep an eye on the stream today, there might be something really cool. A "Memory Tour/Glitchfest" of Super Mario Land 2 is scheduled for about 4pm Central time.
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