Speedrunning festival AGDQ 2023 raises $2.6 million for charity

Awesome Game Done Quick, the annual charity speedrunning event, has raised over $2.6 million dollars during its week-long marathon. The event raised $2,642,493 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, surpassing many of the previous milestones of previous events. 

Running for Jan.8 to Jan. 15, the week-long event saw a group of speedrunners come together remotely to raise money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, a charitable organization which invests in cancer prevention in the US. The event, which had previously been slated to be an offline event for the first time since 2019, was rescheduled to an online event in September, 2022, due to the venue’s contract expiring. 

The event also marked the final event for Games Done Quick founder Mike Uyama, who announced at the start of the event this would be his final year. Uyama had been the head of the GDQ organization for 13 years, with the org raising over $41 million dollars for charity during that time. The first AGDQ was notoriously held in Uyama’s mother’s basement after the original plan to host the event at the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center, Alexandria, Virginia, during MAGFest 8, fell through.

For the first 10 years of its existence AGDQ constantly beat its records for fundraising, going from raising $10k in its first year, to over three million dollars by 2020. However, with the event being forced online during Covid-19, AGDQ saw its first dip in donations in history. The AGDQ 2023 event has surpassed the 2019 event in magnitude, but has not pushed into the records of 2020, 2021, or 2022.

GDQ’s next event will be Summer Games Done Quick, a notionally offline event set to be held between May. 28 and June 4. To catch up on some of the incredible runs from the week of speedrunning, you can check out the Twitch vod, or we suggest heading to the GDQ YouTube, where each run is conveniently labeled. Some of our personal favorites from the event are the Mega Man 64 run by BlueMetal and Aerlien, the hilarious Worms Armageddon run by RuffledBricks, and The Simpson’s Hit & Run by LiquidWiFi run that features some new strats.