At seven on Sunday evening, Stockholm time, a man named Ryan Ford sat down in a hotel ballroom in Minneapolis and started digging out everything that 'Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong-Quest' has been hiding from children since 1995. The category is 102%: the whole campaign plus a clean sweep of the Lost World. It’s such a long, unreasonable way to play the game that it has rarely been let onto a main Games Done Quick stage. The schedule gave him an hour and thirty-eight minutes. Somewhere further south, Mexico and England were squaring up at the Azteca, and I want it on record that I did not check the score once. Football remains a colossal waste of an evening, and I’ve gotten too old to pretend otherwise.
Ford’s run opened Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) 2026, a week of round-the-clock speedrunning beamed out of a Hilton in Minneapolis until Saturday 11 July. Every donation that scrolls past goes to Doctors Without Borders. Last summer’s edition raised more than 2.4 million dollars, which is a remarkable sum to squeeze out of people watching a stranger glide through 'Castlevania' at two in the morning. It goes to a charity that spends it running toward artillery. The same sport I skipped on Sunday recently minted its own Peace Prize and handed it to Donald Trump, so we can all see where football keeps its charitable instincts.
Games Done Quick has run these marathons twice a year since 2010, and the format has barely changed, because nothing about it was broken. The fastest players alive take turns on a stage while a couch of friends explains what your eyes just refused to accept. A frame-perfect jump through a wall gets the reaction the Azteca saves for a goal. Every run carries a time estimate the runner is quietly trying to embarrass, and a donation ticker that never stops feeding it. Put enough money in and the incentives trip: the runner takes the crueller route, or a boss ends up named after somebody’s cat.
Speedrunning is supposed to be the coldest way to love a video game, all frame counts and menu buffering. Then you watch twenty minutes of a GDQ stream and find the warmest room on the internet. Runners narrate their own disasters like weather reports and get cheered through the recovery. The commentary treats you as clever and explains everything anyway, a courtesy the rest of the internet gave up years ago. And underneath all of it, a real medical charity gets funded one absurd donation message at a time.
For once, the timezone maths lands in this continent’s favour. The marathon runs on American hours, so the overnight block, that loose small-hours stretch where the schedule hides its strangest material, spills into the middle of the European day. A run that some poor soul in Portland has set a 4 a.m. alarm for arrives in Stockholm with the afternoon coffee.
Half the fun is watching the schedule treat the medium’s own history as raw material. Some modder has spent real hours grafting 'Half-Life' movement onto 'Jak & Daxter', so Gordon Freeman now speedruns a PlayStation 2 platformer under the name 'Gordon & Daxter', and it airs between ordinary runs with a completely straight face. A little further down sits a showcase on an actual Total Nuclear Annihilation pinball machine, the schedule having quietly decided that furniture counts as a video game if you can beat it fast enough. And somewhere in there is 'Mr. Bones', the 1996 Saturn game about a blues-playing skeleton, which I have chosen not to explain, mostly because I’ve read the plot summary and I still can’t.
The brand-new releases arrive already taken apart. 'Pragmata' and 'Resident Evil: Requiem' are making their marathon debuts barely out of their launch windows, which is how you learn that a game can be fully dismantled by strangers before you’ve finished paying it off. The other newcomers include 'Don’t Stop, Girlypop!' and 'Super Meat Boy 3D', neither of which I made up. Midweek there’s an 'SSX Tricky' against 'SSX 3' race, staged to settle a snowboarding argument that PlayStation 2 owners have been losing to each other since 2003.
The whole thing streams on the Games Done Quick Twitch channel until Saturday, and every run turns up on YouTube after, for anyone not willing to build a working week around a ballroom in Minnesota. Watching costs nothing. Donating is optional, goes straight to Doctors Without Borders, and buys you the small, specific joy of hearing a stranger read your joke aloud on another continent while a man tries not to laugh mid-jump.
There’s a European postscript this year, and it’s a good one. Games Done Quick is going overseas: three days of speedrunning at gamescom in Cologne, 28 to 30 August, kicking off at ten in the morning, Central European Summer Time. I’ve spent years pulling event schedules out of Eastern and Pacific time like a man doing his taxes. Come August, the arithmetic is somebody else’s problem.
