Summer Games Done Quick 2023 Finishes With Over $2.2 Million Raised - Hardcore Gamer

hardcoregamer.com:

Well, another straight week of marathon speedrunning ended this weekend, with the annual Summer Games Done Quick 2023 event having raised $2,239,204 for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres. While the amount raised was smaller than previous years, that can be chalked up to factors such as inflation and a rising cost of living making things difficult for everyone, the show being held earlier than usual on a holiday weekend, or even a crop of high-profile video game releases distracting folks (heck, a recurring joke among the donation was people paying a $5 tax for anyone playing Tears of the Kingdom instead of watching the show). Regardless, it’s still an incredibly amount of money raised by some extremely talented speedrunners for a noble cause.

While this year’s event was again prone to some technical issues and delays (to the point where the whole shebang didn’t wrap up until 7 AM EST on Sunday), the hosts and and the tech crew for Games Done Quick still kept things going strong, with the results being an impressive showcase of speedruns for games ranging from old-school ’80s NES classics such as Gauntlet and Maniac Mansion to modern titles from just earlier this year such as Hi-Fi Rush and Pizza Tower, with seemingly everything in between being run as well. The show climaxed with the likes of Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild, and Super Metroid for the finale (with “Save the Animals” winning again this year), with the former featuring a blindfolded boss battle against Maliketh by Mitchriz and the second being run by Bubzia, who played the entire game blindfolded.

Those runs all featured an insane level of skill, but there was an immense level of strategy and quick reflexes to be found in every run as well.