Zelda: Breath of the Wild blindfolded speedrun showed the best and worst of SGDQ 2023
Summer Games Done Quick has come and gone for another year, capping off a week of speedrunning with a lofty $2,239,204 raised for Doctors Without Borders and Médecins Sans Frontières. One of the standout runs saw a runner tackle The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild blindfolded, though it was also the run where frustrations with the event spilt over.
Most Games Done Quick speedruns are slotted into a schedule before the event, though some are put up as donation incentives – so, if a donation total isn’t met at a certain point in the show, then the run doesn’t go ahead. That typically isn’t an issue, but this time fans found the donation goals beyond their means. It’s a challenging situation to manage, and while stalling between runs did mean a few more bonus runs went ahead, it also led to greater frustration.
“Donation incentives were too high and too many bonus games,” one fan says. “Most of the time GDQ usually meets 90% of their incentives, but this time I think a good third of them or more were missed, and a couple were only met due to some severe stalling.
“Most people don’t have the money to throw around these days because of how bad inflation has gotten and we’re no longer in a pandemic where people don’t have anything better to do but to sit at home and watch marathons.”
That’s the context leading to speedrunner Bubzia taking on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild while blindfolded on the final day of the near-week-long event. Despite the lack of vision and some troubles with the final boss, the streamer pushed through it all to complete the game in roughly one hour and 33 minutes, more than 10 minutes quicker than estimated.
The run is worth checking out for the skill on show, expert analysis, and
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