What To Watch During AGDQ 2022 – Raising Charity Money As Quickly As Possible
Speedrunning isn’t as niche of a concept as it used to be, which shows in the amount of money AGDQ charity speedrunners raise each year.
Speed running is the idea of beating a game as quickly as possible. There is an entire community devoted to this craft with many of the top contenders performing tricks that look like they are begin done by a computer (which is a separate category). For example, beating Super Mario 64 in under 15 minutes and with only collecting 16 stars thanks to some various glitches.
What is AGDQ?
To help develop the community and raise money for charity, Awesome Games Done Quick is a charity event held each year, with donations going to cancer prevention research. The event runs for a week, this year starting on Sunday, Jan 9th and ending on Saturday Jan 15th. This is not some two-bit operation. ADGQ raises millions of dollars every year.
Each game is categorized into how it must be beaten in order to count. In some categories the only requirement is beat the game any way you can. This is called “Any %”. But some other categories include getting every collectible in the game, which is unsurprisingly called “100%”. But then there are the challenge runs, where, for example, people race to beat Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out while blindfolded.
Games To Watch
There are a ton of really interesting games being played this year, but personally, I’m excited for the weird ones. All times in CST (UTC -6) because that’s where I live.
Check out the full schedule here.
- Typing of the Dead — a game where you have to type words on a keyboard to kill zombies — Wednesday, Jan 12th, 5:22 AM CST
- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes — Cooperative game of hidden information and bomb defusing — Thursday, Jan 13th, 11:34 AM CST
- Zelda‘s Adventure for the Phillips CD-i — A official Nintendo licensed game so awful, all mention of it has been scrubbed away — Thursday, Jan 13th, 12:04 AM CST
But there are also plenty which will highlight the skills of the players.
- Blindfolded Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice — Difficult game made more difficult by being blindfolded — Saturday, Jan 15th, 5:12 PM CST
- Hades — Roguelike dungeon crawler made popular thanks to everything about it — Friday, Jan 14th, 8:51 PM CST
- Kingdom Hearts 2 Co-op Randomizer Race – KH2, but everything is randomized, also it’s co-op and a race — Thursday, Jan 13th, 4:16 PM CST
Of course, I am also excited for them to play Sonic Adventure DX, but I’m cringe like that.
Speedrunning not only highlights the true testament of the skill of devoted individuals, but it’s developed a community devoted to helping out however they can. If you’re new to speedrunning, this is a great time to start. Take a chance to peek behind the curtain of this hobby and see what all the fuss is about.
