Don't Miss These Spectacular Summer Games Done Quick 2024 Speedruns
A dog playing baseball, Super Mario 64 with a blindfold, and a speedrunning relay race? It could only be Summer Games Done Quick 2024.
Posted 5 months ago
It’s okay folks, you can take it slow again – Summer Games Done Quick 2024 is officially over, with more than $2.5m USD raised for the international charity Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). The annual speedrunning showcase was, as ever, crammed with more skill and pace than an Olympic relay race.
Wading through SGDQ 2024’s glorious week-long display of high-tempo gaming, we’ve picked out a handful of favorite runs. Gaming prowess is always guaranteed at a GDQ event, but several of the speedruns below were also so bizarre that we’d recommend them to anyone with even a fleeting interest in seeing games get broken at a breakneck pace.
Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree
Maybe it’s just us who spent literal days being utterly brutalized by Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree’s bosses. Because while we were sliced to ribbons by Renalla and mutilated by Messmer countless times, speedrunner blanxz seems serenely comfortable against the lot. In this run, he blitzed through a bunch of DLC baddies in less time than it took us to reach the first boss. Yeah, it’s pretty humbling.
For those worried about spoilers: This wasn’t a complete run of Shadow of the Erdtree. It only covered the bosses shown in pre-release trailers, concluding with Mesmer at the top of the Shadow Keep. If you faced as much trouble as we did when taking down the nasty lot, let this SGDQ 2024 speedrun deliver a kind of cathartic relief. Watch as the bosses struggle to land a hit on blanxz’ nimble Tarnished. And if you really, really don’t want any Shadow of the Erdtree sections spoiled, there was also a complete glitchless run of Elden Ring’s core campaign that clocks in at just over an hour.
Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (by Peanut Butter the dog)
In case you missed his phenomenal Gyromite run at Awesome Games Done Quick 2024, Peanut Butter is a genuine speedrunning shiba inu. No, you’re not barking mad. He’s a dog that’s been trained to play video games. For this year’s summer showcase, the good boy was at the show in person and taking on Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB.
By tapping a unique controller in response to commands, Peanut Butter was able to launch home runs across the park and pitch fast balls past his opposition. We always knew dogs could run faster than humans, but now they can speedrun too? It’s just not fair.
Super Mario 64 Randomizer Blindfolded
Super Mario 64 is a game so well digitally trodden in the speedrunning community that multiple players are comfortable completing it while blindfolded. So how do you step up the challenge from there? With a randomizer, of course.
For this showcase, experienced blindfold runner Bubzia and his team had to enter levels that feature randomized enemies. They’re there to take notes and prepare their route to 10 stars in real time before replaying the entire lot while blindfolded. It’s a quirky and unusual format that demonstrates the degree to which speedrunners are willing to make their own hobby harder for the sake of a challenge and charity.
Super Mario World Kaizo Relay
Races are always one of the best Games Done Quick events, and this year’s Super Mario World Kaizo Relay was a standout. This competition saw two teams of four runners competing to complete a series of immensely challenging and outlandishly creative custom levels. Kaizo Mario, for those who don’t know, features modded, restructured levels and environments. The intent? To make them purposefully more challenging, unfair, and often entertainingly annoying.
In the case of this relay, the runners didn't know the levels in advance, and the current player had to swap out after every three deaths. As such, it was a team effort to uncover what exactly needed to be done before someone finally managed to execute it. The real challenge as a viewer is trying to follow along with their discoveries. Eager for more Kaizo? The SGDQ 2024 schedule also packed in a somewhat more comprehensible (yet no less impressive) Kaizo Mario Galaxy run.
PowerWash Simulator
Did we just spend half an hour watching six people collectively waggle their wrists to clean Bikini Bottom from SpongeBob SquarePants? Yes. And now you can too! It’s oddly meditative stuff, and if you stay tuned past the base run, you can also enjoy Final Fantasy 7’s Seventh Heaven bar getting a much-needed hose down. Seriously Tifa, you were never going to pass health and safety checks with that much muck in the place.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is notorious for being the most agonizingly difficult game from Dark Souls developer FromSoftware. It’s unflinching in its challenge, demanding you master precise parrying and die trying in the process. So when a speedrunner attempts to take on the entire game, live, without receiving a single proper hit from an enemy? You should definitely take note.
This year’s run by Mitchriz doesn’t go smoothly. It isn’t long before both hitless and damageless ambitions are spoiled, and that’s before Windows’ Sticky Keys feature launches a fiendish and unexpected assault. In spite of those troubles, Mitchchriz delivers a gobsmacking performance with a sizzling display of timing talent. It was an immeasurably brave feat to attempt live in front of an audience, and with just a handful of hits taken, it's an unmissable watch for FromSoft fans.
This was also the run during which Games Done Quick's lifetime total money raised surpassed 50m USD – a truly phenomenal accomplishment for the long-running charity drive.
WannaFest 22
And finally, a bout of near incomprehensibility. Summer Games Done Quick always makes room for a wealth of unusual indie inclusions, and they don’t really come stranger than WannaFest 22. From the creator of I Wanna Be The Guy, WannaFest 22 is a surreal and severely demanding fangame platformer that riffs on and utilizes a frankly staggering number of other game series.
Across this hour-long run by Wolsk, you’ll be taken on a tour through retro titles including WarioWare, PaRappa the Rapper, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Monkey Ball, and so many more shelves in gaming's historical archives. All of them, naturally, accompanied by pixel-perfect platforming from the runner.
Those were our favorite runs from Summer Games Done Quick 2024, but you can catch up on all the games and runs on the Games Done Quick YouTube channel.