SUMMER GAMES DONE QUICK 2026

if you've been reading this blog for a while, you already know what's up, and if you haven't, welcome! i like to do write-ups about Games Done Quick! these speedrunning marathons have become a pretty foundational fixture of my year, giving me a bit of an at-home vacation and an emergency injection of hopium every six months or so. with something in the range of 150-ish games and $2.4 million dollars raised for Médecins Sans Frontières, Summer Games Done Quick 2026 was yet another amazing marathon, building on the momentum they've accrued over the last few events when it comes to production value and fascinating new showcases never before seen on the biggest stage in speedrunning.

normally, i tend to front-load these event overviews with a lot of my feelings about the things that happened between runs and surrounding the event, but as i've had to reconfigure this whole thing a couple of times, a lot of that's gonna be way down at the bottom of the page this time. it's preamble low%! you get to jump right into my top picks for must-see runs from throughout the week!

i might not know much about Castlevania, but i do know what Castlevania played really, absurdly well can look like, and this run feels like one of the most superlative examples i can think of. for Dr4gonBlitz to do his own commentary over a game with movement tech that requires both precision and constant repetition would already be impressive, but to do all this while mentally keeping track of a global cycle that spans half of the run had me feeling breathless waiting to see what might happen. Symphony of the Night is a staple of speedrunning for good reason, and i think this run is such a perfect encapsulation of why.

having seen basically everyone on this stage run at previous GDQs, and having kept my eye on Don't Stop, Girlypop! since it released, i knew i was in for a treat here, but i don't think i could've predicted just how in-sync the vibes were between the runner and the game. with an intense dedication to its aesthetics, an overwhelmingly high skill ceiling, and what i'm pretty sure is the exact same Audiowide font i used to use for this very blog, Girlypop! quickly became not just the game from SGDQ that i knew i had to try, but the game from SGDQ that i bought in the middle of the run because i just couldn't wait. for sapphire_in_pink to be dealing with the sensory barrage of this incredibly fast game while also being one of the funniest runners i've ever seen is astonishing, and i can only hope that the growing renaissance of weird indie first-person shooters keeps bringing us banger run after banger run in this same vein.

when i look at the GDQ games list and see a game that makes me go "how do you even speedrun that", i know it's going to be a must-watch demonstration, and i'm happy to report that Hey You, Pikachu! is no different. for a game with such a unique input method prone to some equally unique failures, optimization very quickly leads down some interesting roads. this game truly feels like it's been encased in amber, a perfect little preservation of a franchise on a meteoric rise looking for new ways to engage with its audience, so to meet it on such distinct terms in 2026 and watch the runners wrestle with its limitations is a really fun new experience. maybe it's just that i can relate as someone who spent a lot of this GDQ looking after a new puppy, but i think this lived up to the excitement i felt when i first raised the question of "how".

oftentimes, when thinking about what makes a good GDQ schedule, one of the dichotomies that comes up a lot is the balance between surprising and unexpected deep cuts and big-name franchises sure to fire up the crowd. every now and then, though, you get a game that sort of runs the whole gamut, and in this case, it's one i love a lot! Super Princess Peach is an often overlooked spinoff, a small fish in the massive pond of Nintendo DS games, but i grew up with it, and seeing it make its way to the GDQ stage after apparently a decade of submissions is lovely. it's got just enough of the familiar Mario set dressing to help you get your bearings, but Ali_Robotnik does a great job showing off the quirks of this game that make it a surprisingly technical speedrun. it's got, in the most literal sense possible, its own vibes, and an equally interesting history as a speedrun, and seeing all that passion for this game coming through really struck a chord with me.

look around this website. did you really think i wasn't going to put the Transformers run on here? c'mooon. i know too much ball to resist.

though my love for all things Transformers might have drawn me in, War for Cybertron delivers on its own merits as a speedgame, and Nestani makes for an excellent guide through how far this game has come. having played this game myself back in the halcyon days of the Xbox 360, i can recognize the big story beats and how they're being subverted, but i think it's plain to see for anyone watching just how far off the rails speedrunners can get. transformation is front-and-center as a unique way to clip through geometry and escape the iron grip of 2010s 'cinematic' game design, and at its fastest, the game becomes almost akin to Rocket League, with cars doing all sorts of acrobatic maneuvers past the edge of the level. if you love seeing ridiculous out-of-bounds skips, this is absolutely the run for you.

kaizo's made its way onto every one of these lists since SGDQ 2024, and maybe you could say i need to branch out, but i'd just say that i'll branch out when they stop finding cool new things to do to Super Mario World, which seems like it's on track to happen around the heat death of the universe. this particular run taps into the sightreading appeal of past kaizo relays, but with an entire set of levels built around a new co-op mechanic. watching these extremely talented runners feeling out not just the tricks they're being asked to do, but the basic fundamentals of a simultaneous Mario and Luigi - such as the fact that you have to make sure your partner's automatic level clear animations don't send them plummeting into a trap - really caught my attention. kaizo, to me, is always at its most fun to watch when i keep going back and forth between admiring the ingenuity of the level designers and the sheer skill of the players, and this run encapsulates both those elements at their finest.

i'm a well-known lover of all things silly and awful at Games Done Quick, and to my unexpected delight, it seems like what has traditionally been a graveyard shift block has managed to break through into the morning and afternoon. for the first time, i found myself waking up far too early for my kusoge fix rather than staying up far too late. picking just one run out of this star-studded lineup is difficult, but in my heart of hearts, i know i have to give the nod to SABOR. DOS games are an absolute gold mine for the kind of weird games that i crave, and Ritzblues dug deep for this one. combining Russian folklore with hand-to-hand combat, SABOR feels like a mix of Pikmin and pro wrestling as you throw a band of identical forest-dwelling lads feet first at an army of opponents. with often inscrutable gameplay and an intense commitment to the bit from everyone involved, i easily would put SABOR up there with the greats like Urban Yeti and Mr. Bones.

it's been a real treat watching GDQ continue to grow and flex their production bona fides, and it's always exciting to see them pull something off for the first time, especially when it goes so well. we're knee-deep into the era of getting arcade cabinets onto the main stage for rhythm showcases, but for the first time, us home viewers got to have a glimpse of the fabled GDQ pinball machines. i think Ryan McSquid puts the appeal here far better than i ever could right at the start of the run; in pinball, you're dealing with real-world physics, and everything can be equated to a frame-perfect trick. as someone who hasn't had a lot of hands-on time with a lot of physical pinball, it's really novel seeing not only how the production team translates the experience to the stream, but also such a masterful display of talent from someone who's playing at a competitive level. as different as it might initially seem, the overlap is there, and there's just as much excitement and anticipation in watching Ryan set up the perfect multi-ball as there is in watching a strat come together in any digital game being run.

i have a lot of misgivings about Ron Howard as a filmmaker. between his preemptive hagiography of the as-of-this-writing vice president of the United States and his shallow, downright mercenary approach to dragging Solo: A Star Wars Story across the finish line, i think the man's done a lot to torch his legacy. all that being said, i do like Apollo 13. it's a tense, gripping portrait of experts who have to turn a hypothetical possibility into reality by the skin of their teeth. you may be scrolling up and down a bit at this point to make sure you're still on the same page, or maybe wondering if i pasted in an excerpt from the wrong page, but no, no, we're still talking about SGDQ. what i'm trying to say is that now, when i want my fix, i can instead turn to this Balatro run.

this one's definitely breached containment and made its way in front of plenty of people already, but this is my list, and this run is one of the coolest things i've seen happen on a GDQ stage, so i'm talking about it. i've enjoyed quite a bit of Balatro on my own time, but this showcase goes far beyond my level of expertise and very literally pushes the game to its logical limits. despite being several steps above my knowledge of the game, adef and his co-commentators do an excellent job explaining the path to naneinf, even as that path begins to swerve wildly. it's hard to imagine a more polarized combination of things going exactly right and exactly wrong in the way we see here, and the end result is an absolutely impeccable showcase that i think anyone could sit down and enjoy, whether they're a Balatro freak or a first-timer.

despite having, i think, the exact type of brain that would've absolutely latched on to Kingdom Hearts as a formative piece of media, i got unlucky and spawned in an Xbox household. in trying to go back and familiarize myself with the series, i've fallen off pretty hard; i've left Tarzan on read for like, half of 2026, because i simply cannot deal with his jungle. all that being said, i know enough about these games to know that one of their most iconic attributes is their high-level boss fights, and even having seen the game run in several impressive ways at GDQ over the years, i think this is undoubtedly the most refined showcase of that side of Kingdom Hearts yet.

randomizers can often come across a little unapproachable to those who haven't played the base game, but this run has two key tricks up its sleeve. first of all, the commentary is on point, especially given we're seeing one of GDQ's most high-energy presenters team up with one of the developers of the randomizer itself. what i really think makes this whole thing work, though, is the format, with the framing of a 'hitlist' of bosses to hunt down. rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae of the intended progression and how it's been shuffled around, this run instead feels like a high-octane boss rush with a clear structure all its own, focused on scouting out the necessary tools and then putting them into action against the hardest bosses Kingdom Hearts 2 has to offer. it's some of the best parts of the series distilled into a really unique showcase, full of infectuous energy and building up to an utterly unbelievable 'two players, one controller' finale. even for someone like me who's had a lot of near-misses with the series, i think this was one of the coolest things to happen all week.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

i think the must-see run of the marathon that doesn't fit neatly on the list has to be the debut of a new Super Mario 64 120-star TAS. my feelings on 64 as one of the definitive speedgames of all time and the myriad ways in which you can showcase different sides of it are well-trodden ground for this blog, and this presentation was no different. i was shocked to hear this is the first new tool-assisted route put together since 2012, and you can feel the excitement and dedication beaming through the screen as the authors explain a lighting-fast barrage of impossible tricks.

i also have to shout-out Friday night's Resident Evil double feature. Requiem is still hot off the presses, even if it looks like CaptainEzekiel has already pushed the game to an incredible degree of mastery, and the classic Resident Evil 3: Nemesis looks just as effortless even when played on a Guitar Hero controller.

and, as always, my last and most honorable of honorable mentions is an emphatic plea for you to go look through the archives yourself. maybe you're really, really into Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen, and if that's the case, i'm of no use to you, because i've never really seen that game and it was on at 3:50am. go forth and find the weird little niches i didn't cover! please. pretty please.

and that about wraps up the games that got done quick at Summer Games Done Quick! a lot of other things that weren't games also happened, and not only do i have a lot to say about them, but i happened to check social media while taking a brief break from writing this section and wound up with even more to say, because things have kept happening even after the marathon.

i want to start on a positive note, with something unequivocally good that happened during the marathon. on Friday night, right between some very high-profile runs, a representative from MSF introduced a short 10-minute documentary on patients struggling to receive continued medical care in Gaza. it was unflincingly direct about how the IDF's repeated violation of ceasefires has impacted local communities, and how difficult it has been for Palestinians to both evacuate to receive care and return to a decimated support system. afterwards, interview team member spikevegeta, normally known as one of the most bombastic and jovial members of GDQ's community, gave an incredibly raw speech about the importance of what Médecins Sans Frontières does.

to take time for this presentation at such a critical point in the marathon, right on the cusp of the weekend as many viewers were probably arriving home from work, speaks very loudly about the kind of integrity and moral backbone i associate with Games Done Quick. it's impossible not to at least touch on the genocide in Gaza when talking about how MSF puts our donations into action, but this was the most outspoken moment of support and solidarity i've ever seen broadcast from the main stage. for an event that's built around positivity and play, it takes courage to change the tone, to be vulnerable and convey the gravity of the situation. it takes a level of trust in the audience, to say that we can acknowledge harsh realities and still find it in ourselves to keep going, to keep having a good time supporting a good cause. even just writing about it, it's really stuck with me in a way that i find it hard to capture in words.

now, the messy part. the day after the marathon ended - the day a lot of this article was written - GDQ held their usual post-marathon Hotfix stream, which usually entails showcasing unused backup runs and introducing people to the types of shows that happen during the off-season between the big marathons. this time, however, GDQ announced they were doing a segment featuring runs from the Metal Slug series, sponsored by SNK. for those who might not be aware, after several brushes with financial ruin, SNK is currently owned by the MiSK Foundation, who are in turn owned by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

SGDQ 2026 was, even moreso than usual, a proud display of the kind of integrity that makes me love Games Done Quick. for them to turn around and run a stream the very next day sponsored by a company that's thoroughly been subsumed by a nation guilty of violating human rights was a bitter pill for many, including myself, to swallow. as people tuned in after seeing the announcement on social media, things got pricklier as Twitch chat moderation seemed to be focused on shutting down observations and remarks about SNK and their ownership. i understand that quick and strict moderation is a big part of how GDQ maintains its status as one of the last gaming events not overrun by chuds, and that bad faith criticisms have generally driven them to stick to their guns and not give arguments the time of day, but in this case, that overall directive only ended up raising more questions about the collaboration. eventually, the volunteer mods, hands almost definitely tied but clearly very aware that this was becoming a big deal, directed people to email GDQ's management.

before the stream could wrap up, Games Done Quick shut the partnership down. quite literally; they still had people streaming Metal Slug and waiting to start the next run when hosts said on air that the event was being cancelled, and all this was co-streamed to SNK's own YouTube channel, meaning that there was briefly a clip on SNK's page about how GDQ had made the snap decision not to take SNK's sponsorship anymore. in their announcement thread on Bluesky, they claim full responsibility for not taking a close enough look at SNK as a sponsor, and pledge to "review and strengthen our process for evaluating future sponsors and partners, including closer examination of companies’ ownership, to make sure they're aligned with our values."

i've sat with a lot of messy feelings about this all day, and i think some of it is still too messy to be worth putting out there. what i do feel comfortable saying is that Games Done Quick is, for lack of a better way to put it, a medium through which good can happen. i care a lot about them and the good that they do, but that good happens because of people, and Games Done Quick is just one of many banners under which they might come together to do good. as an organization, i do want to credit them with doing pretty much the most morally correct thing they could've in the moment; cutting the stream is already more than i really expected, given the messy entanglements of corporate sponsorships. to spell my stance out as much as i can, i don't feel like this is some unforgivable sin, and i'm willing to offer more grace than usual when it comes to a platform that's brought so many people together to make a positive impact in the world.

at the same time, i do deeply hope that we get some kind of follow-up on how they're making these processes stronger. i don't need heads to roll, i don't need to see anyone publicly shamed, but i struggle to see how nobody caught this before the stream went live. i've seen some people making the argument that SNK's ownership is obscure inside baseball only known by fighting game nerds, but... GDQ is an organization literally built by nerds, many of whom do participate in the fighting game community! statistically, i'd expect someone along the chain to at least half-remember hearing about this at some point. i'm extending the benefit of the doubt, and i want them to take their time to get this done right, but i do want to hear about what kinds of oversight they're implementing once they've had time to figure that out.

throughout the week of SGDQ, a lot of people said a lot of things that truly resonated with me, whether it was Quacksilver's shockingly poignant speech about "bottling the joy" before full-clearing Crab Rave in Rift of the NecroDancer, or head of prizes Bobbeigh talking about how this event is "a queer effort, a Black effort, an everyone effort" as the total broke past $2 million. in the broad sense that plays nicely with doing these little event write-ups, i could say that SGDQ 2026 is what moved me. right now, though, i think it's important to attribute those words to the individuals themselves, because they're the ones using their talents for good and, in an idealistic way, shaping what GDQ can and should be.

and then there's little ol' me, who initially had a much cleaner segue into all of this, and will insist upon writing this personal baggage out even without one. last time, i talked about how the big reveal of AGDQ's new venue in Atlanta was kind of lighting a fire under my ass. the linear march of time has progressed as usual, we're six months closer, and AGDQ 2027 continues to become a realer and realer prospect, with an actual hotel i can actually look up online where i might actually be staying come January.

i want to make that trip work for a lot of reasons, but even if i don't, i think the next time you see one of these GDQ write-ups, it might look a hell of a lot different. i started doing these as an evolution of personal habits; i liked recommending the best stuff out of GDQ to my friends who don't spend the whole week glued to the screen, and once i started running a blog, it made sense to give that stuff a permanent home here. i still want to cover the best of GDQ, but i think the current format is definitely showing its limitations a bit. for starters, as GDQ diversifies its schedule and puts on more and more one-of-a-kind showcases, it becomes a little trickier to draw upon connections and comparisons to create a useful resource for where you might want to explore when searching through the VODs. i also feel like the lists are starting to feel a little homogenous? i can't help being who i am, and that means things like kaizo Mario, movement shooters, and kusoge are pretty much always guaranteed entries. i'm happy to provide my own perspective on why i like what i like, but it might help to be a little more flexible on the structure.

assuming i make it out to AGDQ 2027 in-person, there's also the fact that it'll just be a different experience that i'll have different things to say about. being right there in the building and participating in what is increasingly sounding like a well-rounded convention, with vendors and cosplay contests and a whole community to socialize with, means a different set of priorities, and a different way of watching the event unfold. i guess what i'm saying is that if i can properly get my shit together with AGDQ as a looming deadline, then maybe i'll come back and just write a travelogue about going to the arcade and scoring a C- on the maimai cabinet.

of course, as the brief few hours of SNK-induced panic and outrage showed, it's probably worth having more faith in myself than in any one organization. Games Done Quick is helpful as a bit of external pressure, but becoming someone who i think can go to a convention and have fun with less hang-ups is going to be good for my soul and it's worth doing for its own sake. speedrunning, at its core, is about self-improvement and competition with yourself. it's something worth keeping in mind when you look at all the amazing individuals who choose to do good work raising money for good causes, and it's just as important as a reminder to myself.