After a week of feats of athletic gaming, Summer Games Done Quick raised over 1.2 million dollars for Doctors Without Borders.
The Games Done Quick Twitter account tweeted the good news last night, saying that after was all said and done, the organization raised 1.295 million bucks.
If you haven’t figured it out already, a couple times a year speed-runners gather together to show off their impressive gaming skills by beating games, you guessed it, quickly.
One of the highlights this year was when one speed-runner completed a tool assisted run of Super Mario Bros. 3 in two seconds. Giant Bomb says that a tool assisted speed run or TAS is a type of run where the fastest time is shown if human error wasn’t a factor. This is achieved in various ways, usually with an emulated copy of the game that “exploit emulator functions like slowdown, frame advance, and savestates.”
According to Kotaku, speed-runner ais523 used previously unknown glitch in the game that involved inputting button commands at a ridiculous speed, hence the tool assisted run. He explains the minutia of the run in this Reddit thread.
…if you’re reading the controller repeatedly until you get two values the same (in order to work around the DPCM/controller conflict), then if the controller reads a different output each time (because you’re mashing the controller really fast), it’s going to get stuck in a loop, potentially allowing for the code that handles the start of a frame running recursively. If the game isn’t designed to expect that to happen (and if the code in question isn’t really laggy, why would it?), bad things happen, and it was a case of finding a game in which the bad things in question would happen to let us win instantly.
You can check out the brief video below.
While SGDQ may be done for the year, fans of speed-running won’t have to wait long as Games Done Quick announced that their next charity marathon, Awesome Games Done Quick, will kick off January 8th and run till the 15th.
Last year, Game Informer reported that the event also raised 1.2 million dollars, that time for the Cancer Prevention Society.