Summer Games Done Quick 2024: This Year’s Best Speedruns
Five years ago, when I was an 18-year-old intern at Game Informer, I and my fellow interns received press passes to attend Summer Games Done Quick 2019.
It was an incredibly magical experience. Not only did we get to see some of the best speedrunners in the world perform their craft in person, but we also got to hang out in an arcade and pinball room full of amazing games. The most electrifying part, however, was the energy of other attendees, full of enthusiasm for a shared love of videogames and breaking them apart.
Five years later, as a 23-year-old contributing writer for Paste Magazine, I came back, and it was just as magical. Watching runs online is great, and that’s still how I watched most of the runs on this list, but seeing them in person is something else.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to do that has passed, but watching the recordings of the runs on YouTube is nearly as good. With that said, here are the best speedruns from Summer Games Done Quick 2024, with most of them lumped together into similar categories.
The Marios
Mario always has a strong presence at Games Done Quick events, but he had an especially big one this time around. With a total of seven runs over around eight hours, nearly every type of Mario game was represented, from Mario Kart DS by runner Abel to Super Mario RPG Remake, run by VOoid. Of particular note are a blink-and-you-miss-it, five-minute run of the original Super Mario Bros. by GTAce, a race of evil stages in Super Mario Maker 2 between CarlSagan42 and juzcook, and a logic-defying blindfolded run of Super Mario 64 by Bubzia where, just to make things even more interesting, the location of the stars is randomized. Speedrunners are insane!
My top two picks, however, are the “kaizo” runs of the event, which are mods of Mario games to make them incredibly challenging. The first is Kaizo Mario Galaxy, a mod of Super Mario Galaxy showcased by 360Chrism. Most kaizo mods are of 2D Mario games, particularly Super Mario World, so seeing one of a more modern, 3D game was a treat.
My second pick is a kaizo team race of Super Mario World, where two teams of four, the Groovy Goombas and Funky Fuzzies, competed in kaizo stages nobody had ever seen before, as they were made just for the event. Some of the stages are absolutely wild, and seeing each team progress through the crazy stages was exhilarating.
The Zeldas
Comparatively, The Legend of Zelda runs were harder to come by at the event, but the three we did get were still great. At a total of around four and a half hours, the simplest run of the event was one of Ocarina of Time by dannyb, which was still crazy due to a newly discovered skip that warps Link from the beginning straight to the final boss even faster than the previous skip.
The other two are even crazier, with one being a run of A Link to the Past where Glan breaks apart the game until it’s a glitchy mess, still beating each dungeon boss without a sword. The other was a three-hour co-op randomizer run of Twilight Princess between gymnast86 and spikevegeta, where they worked together to figure out where key items were located in a map of the game where they could be anywhere.
The Pokémons
There were only two runs of Pokémon games this time, but they total around five hours. This is largely thanks to a massive run of Pokémon White 2 by TTS4life, playing in hard mode and fighting Cynthia, one of the game’s hardest trainers, over nearly three and a half hours.
The other run was of Pokémon Violet’s Teal Mask DLC by ThomasPatrickWX, which takes advantage of the game’s many glitches to, you guessed it, go fast.
The Sonics
There were around three hours of Sonic goodness this year at SGDQ over four runs. The most straightforward were all-emerald runs of Sonic Robo Blast 2 by Argick and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles by TheSoundDefense.
My top picks, though, are Sonic Project 06, run by Stelmo98, and Super “Sonic Saves the World” World, run by Shoujo. The former is a from-the-ground-up fan remake of the maligned Sonic ‘06, aiming to make the game more fun to play and, in turn, more fun to speedrun. The latter can barely be counted as a Sonic game, really being more of a kaizo Mario game with Sonic as a skin, but hey, he’s in the title, so that’s the category I’m putting him under.
The Metroids
The two Metroid games represented at SGDQ were in the form of a 100% run of Metroid Fusion by monkeysmb and an any% race of Super Metroid by ShinyZeni, ARC, Oatsngoats and Imyt. These games weren’t defiled by mods in the way many others were, but there’s nothing quite like watching clean, crisp gameplay of Metroid games by some of the best to ever do it.
The Celestes
Oh, you thought Celeste was a single game? Think again! The game has become so incredibly popular with speedrunners and modders that there are a ton of them out there, including microgames made by the original’s developers.
Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain is one of the latter, made by the original creators of Celeste in about a week and transporting Madeline into the 3D space. Resembling a mix of Celeste and Super Mario Odyssey, it’s so fun to watch TheShadedMaster tear through a game that was already short to begin with.
Celeste Custom Maps: Monika’s D-Sides falls into the former category, with runner carrarium making an incredibly hard mod of an already-hard game look like a piece of strawberry shortcake.
The Soulslikes
There weren’t actually any runs of Dark Souls games this time around, but there were still plenty of games inspired by the series. The one non-From Software game in the category was Another Crab’s Treasure, in the form of a race between LilAggy and spicee. Although the game looks a lot cheerier than most Soulslikes, it’s no less punishing, so seeing the two go at it led to lots of tense moments.
The two From Software games were Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Elden Ring, which included its DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree. The Sekiro run was intended to be a hitless one by runner Mitchriz, and although he wasn’t quite able to pull that off, it was still impressive nonetheless.
And what needs to be said about Elden Ring? The game is awesome. Speedruns of the game is awesome. Runner blanxz is awesome.
Yoshi’s Story
Dan Salvato, the creator of the horror/dating sim/visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club, is also incredibly good at videogames, being in the competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee scene and, as it turns out, the Yoshi’s Story speedrunning scene as well. Having run the game for 11 years and applied to run it at GDQ nearly every event, finally getting in and showing off one of his favorite games was clearly an emotional moment for Salvato.
Silly Games Block
Between the hours of 2 a.m. and 9 a.m. on July 4, when most sensible people would be sleeping, the runners of SGDQ 2024 were playing a bunch of silly games. There are too many to go into detail here, but Golf It!, Monster Party, Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, Mad Panic Coaster, Muscle March, City Bus Driver Simulator, Leaf Blower Man: This Game Blows!, Wild Woody, SUSHI SOUL UNIVERSE, Zoombinis and Stuart Little 2 are all hilarious and still impressive.
However, my top two picks are runs of Bird Aren’t Real: The Game by allison8bit and Barbie by Konception. The first is an intentionally silly game made as a student project where your goal is to pilot a robot bird and suppress those who are trying to get the word out about, well, birds not being real. The second is a terrible NES game that Konception got really good at, with him and the coach wearing their best Barbie gear.
Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB
You had to be there. Run by returning dog speedrunner Peanut Butter and trained by JSR_, this is the first time he appeared in person. Seeing Peanut Butter go neck and neck with the AI opponents of the SNES baseball game and hearing the audience react is tense, but the moment where he finally wins after multiple extra innings borders on a spiritual experience.
There is still beauty in the world, because Peanut Butter the dog is in it.
Joseph Stanichar is a freelance writer who specializes in videogames and pop culture. He’s written for publications such as Game Informer, Twinfinite and Looper. He’s on Twitter @JosephStanichar.