Summer Games Done Quick 2015 has wrapped up this morning. The event raised around 1.25 million during the week long charity stream where around 125 games and 140 players donated their time and expertise to give the gaming community an entertaining 24/7 display of gripping moments, glitched games and great commentary.

Background

For the uninitiated, the point of the Games Done Quick community is to beat a game as quickly as possible. For any given game, there is a pocketed community that devotes hours in finding the fastest path, developing the best execution and discovers the newest time savers. Completing a game can mean many things to many people. The categories are typically:

  • Any % (Complete the game with any percent of the game completed)
  • 100% (Complete the game with everything collected)
  • Glitchless (Complete the game without unintended exploits)
  • Race (Compete against other players to beat the game as quickly as possible) – used more for games with heavy randomness throughout the game.

To view the official world records for many games, you can check them out at http://speeddemosarchive.com/

This is probably enough background to understand the majority of speedrun videos and enough to understand the highlights for SGDQ2015.

Great Commentary:

These highlights have players who aren’t only playing great games, but are also comfortable enough to deliver great commentary to enhance the experience of watching their runs. They are both charming, collected making it what they’re doing seem effortless. They also have great twitch streams, too.

Mario Lost Levels (GameJ06):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dZL0ykBN0c

I wanna be the boshy (Witwix):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzLQX35JGKQ

Yoshi’s Island (Trihex):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhTnrMyH51c

 

Fun to watch:

These videos aren’t just mesmerizing visually, but display a prowess that makes it seem like these players have put in their 10,000 hours. Some of them have and their wizard-like mastery proves it.

Tetris Grandmasters:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4XHa3adhVM

Dustforce DX (with devs):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M38ZHSjdz3w

Megaman 3: Burst Chaser:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ietmEOgkbHg

Legend of Zelda OOT (Any %)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kaGp48_qPY

 

TASBot:

Engineers using emulation to find the best pixel perfect and frame perfect speedrun to any game that can be emulated. Over the years, speedrunners and tas-ers have worked hand-in-hand to bring run-times down significantly. Tas-ers find a new optimization for a game, glitch to exploit, bug to execute their own code and speedrunners try to duplicate it with hours of practice.

Megaman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNekhWAc9Rs

Sonic Advanced:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROyFM-eNmBg

Ikaruga:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWjuPxE3RCk

 

Races:

Many players, one goal: Finish the game before the other one. Drama is built into the race already, but exponentially increases when small frame windows for jumps and cycles exist.

Madita Calista:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBo6WesM4uQ

Megaman 4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C1HLFU3Oj4

Mario 64 (Any %):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVGHGxkdzdE

Castlevania Symphony of the Night (All bosses):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZFo2QaI6ME

 

 

Twitter:@GIntrospection

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