10 Speedruns from Awesome Games Done Quick 2023 Online You Need to Watch
Of the seven days’ worth of speedruns, these are the 10 you won’t want to miss.
It’s the beginning of another year, which means that Awesome Games Done Quick is back, albeit virtually again due to Florida legislation making it unsafe for LGBTQ+ people and people who don’t want to get COVID. That didn’t stop awesome games from being done quick, however, as the event raised over $2.6 million in support of the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
Being a 24/7 event, please understand that it would have been damaging to my health to have watched every single event, and there are still many I’ve not watched that I’d like to, such as a run of Blade II that was as much an interesting interview with the game’s developers as it was a showcase of how it could be broken and sped through. That said, of the 24 runs I did get to watch, these are my 10 favorites, in no particular order.
The Zeldas
Okay, so lumping a bunch of games from the same series might be considered “cheating” by some, but to me, it’s just an exploit to speed through as many games as possible. There were five Zelda speedruns, of varying lengths and flavors. My favorite was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild being run in under half an hour, thanks to some new crazy glitches the runner named Player 5 was able to use to his advantage.
The other four were great as well, though! There was a race of BS Legend of Zelda, which doesn’t stand for a bad word but instead stands for Broadcast Satellaview, which was a Japan-only SNES add-on that used satellite technology to download games way before digital downloads and cloud streaming were commonplace. It’s a cool piece of history that got to be displayed in speedy form.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was a mind-melting three-hour run that used “reverse bit magic” to trigger flags and basically code what they wanted into the game by running around on the title screen. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and A Link to the Past are pretty standard mainstays for AGDQ, but it’s always fun to see them absolutely broken apart and pieced back together.
The Marios
There were a whopping seven runs of Mario games, but you won’t hear me complaining! The most noteworthy was the four-player race of Super Mario Galaxy 2, which produced a new world record for the three-hour any% category by Jhay. There were also two insane Kaizo Mario runs of fan-made, super-difficult Super Mario World hacks, as well as more traditional runs of Super Mario Land, Super Mario Bros. 3, and a bonus showcase of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s DLC tracks.
But did I say seven games? Because it’s more like 11, since Skybilz’s run of Super Mario All-Stars Shuffler was an hour and 20-ish minutes of running through five Mario games at the same time, shuffling randomly between each game every 30 seconds to 10 minutes.
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