UPDATED 19:00 EST / JANUARY 11 2016

NEWS

Awesome Games Done Quick speedrun marathon raised $1.2M for charity

The week-long speedrun for charity event Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) came to a close on Sunday, and the event organizers announced that they have raised over $1.2 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

This month’s AGDQ event did not manage to raise quite as much money as a previous marathon held in January 2015, which pulled in over $1.5 million thanks in part to a $200,000 contribution from a partnership with Humble Bundle. However, AGDQ organizer Mike Uyama said the team is still thrilled with the amount raised.

“I feel good about it,” Uyama told Polygon. “That’s basically what we hit last year when you factor out the Humble Bundle, and we don’t have the Humble Bundle this year.”

The event’s livestream frequently reached over 150,000 concurrent viewers during speedruns of some of the more popular games, and at one point the stream hit a peak of over 200,000  viewers.

Best moments from Awesome Games Done Quick

Speedruns are often full of excitement, and this month’s AGDQ was no exception. Here are a few of the top moments from the event. You can watch the full VOD of the event on the GamesDoneQuick Twitch channel.

Staiain the StepMania maniac

Open source rhythm game StepMania is basically Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers, and last week at ADGQ, Norwegian gamer Stian “Staiain” Kristensen proved himself to be the king of the finger-dancers, clocking in up to 30 notes per second during his frantic playthrough.

Staiain’s feat was so impressive that the interest his speedrun generated for StepMania managed to temporarily crash the game’s official website.

Super Mario Maker blind race

The Mario series is one of the most beloved game franchises for speedrunners, and the games have been attempted so many times that new world records often manage to shave only fractions of a second off of previous times.

The speedrunning community knows the location of every block, enemy, and glitch in the Mario universe, which is why ADGQ’s blind race through custom Super Mario Maker custom levels was so exciting: No one knew what the heck they were doing.

To make the race even more chaotic, players were divided into teams and were required to switch out after each death. And there were a lot of deaths. The Super Mario Maker race was the highwater mark in terms of viewership for AGDQ, with over 200,000 people tuning in at once.

“Impossible” Crypt of the NecroDancer Coda playthrough

Crypt of the NecroDancer is a “hardcore roguelike rhythm game” that only allows players to choose an action if they time it to the beat of the game music. Naturally, this can make it incredibly difficult to play, but during AGDQ, player SpootyBiscuit not only managed to beat the game, he did so in the ridiculously tough “Coda Mode,” which is actually described in-game as “probably impossible.”

“As it says on the screen, the developers kind of thought this would probably be impossible to clear when they made it,” SpootyBiscuit said at the start of the playthrough. “What all this boils down to is I’m only allowed a dagger, I have to move at double tempo, I can’t miss any beats, I die in one hit, and I die if I touch gold.”

Basically, any mistake made during an already difficult game would result in immediate failure, yet somehow SpootBiscuit managed to successfully the complete the game in Coda Mode, becoming one of only a handful of players worldwide to do so.

Screenshot via GamesDoneQuick | Twitch

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