Awesome Games Done Quick is coming back for 2018, bringing more than 130 hours of speedrunning to the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport Hotel to raise funds for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Registration to attend is closed but the whole thing will be livestreamed on Twitch, and if you’re looking for a particular game or runner to watch, the full schedule has now been posted.
The event will begin at 11:30 am ET on January 7 with some pre-show hype, and come to an end in the big finale at 6:02 am (or thereabouts, I’m guessing) on January 14. More than 150 runners are set to take part, working their magic on an incredibly diverse range of games including Skyrim, Yooka-Laylee, Contra, Serious Sam 3, Resident Evil 7, Ori and the Blind Forest, Umihara Kawase, and, let’s see… how about Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon. There’s a lot going on here.
Speedrunning, for anyone who’s not familiar with the term, is simply the art of getting through a game as quickly as possible. There are different types of runs with different restrictions attached, but generally speaking they involve bending (or breaking) the in-game rules in ways the developers never intended. The sprawling RPG Divinity: Original Sin, for instance, can be finished in a little over 20 minutes if you know what you’re doing.
It’s not the best way to play the game, perhaps, but it makes for a popular spectator sport: Last year’s AGDQ event attracted more than 1400 live attendees and four million unique viewers on Twitch, with more than 250,000 watching concurrently at one point, and raised more than $2.2 million.