This year's summertime installment is particularly special, as it's the first in 2.5 years to take place at a physical venue—albeit with some of the most stringent masking and distancing requirements we've seen in a livestreamed public show in 2022. (GDQ's organizers appear to read the news, which makes sense for a series that benefits the likes of Doctors Without Borders.) Even with precautions taken, its combination of players, commentators, and crowds in the same room has brought excitement back to its broadcasts, which is why we're pulling together some of the best runs from the past week, as archived at GDQ's official YouTube channel.
The event is still ongoing as of this article's publication, which means you can watch it right now via its Twitch channel. The event's final runs, dedicated to Elden Ring, will conclude in the late hours on Saturday, July 2.
Tunic, 2022, "true ending" run
If you haven't yet played Tunic, we recommend you pause before watching this game-breaking, spoiler-filled romp through many of its biggest secrets. (My March review of the game has far fewer spoilers.) But if you've already collected the game's slew of hidden "instruction booklet" pages, consider this a must-watch, because it includes a compelling guest on real-time commentary: Andrew Shouldice, the game's lead designer, programmer, and artist.
He's joined by a member of the Power-Up Audio team, which worked on the game's soundtrack, and they divulge tons of information about how the game was made—including confirmation about how many of the biggest exploits were intentionally left by the devs in the game. At one point, Shouldice watches a trick begin to play out, telling the crowd that he programmed it to be a possibility but could never personally trigger it. Moments later, the speedrunner demonstrated the trick, allowing him to warp through a wall and bypass a ton of tricky content.
Halo Infinite, 2021, "no tank gun" run
Many classic games' speedruns include multiple categories, and the most broken ones are known as "any-percent" runs, since they allow players to use any tricks and skip any quests that they want. In certain games' cases, these kinds of runs can be boring to watch, and the infamously glitchy Halo Infinite is no exception.
This speedrun begins with a demonstration of the "tank gun," which bolts an unlimited-ammo gun to Master Chief's feet. That's too much assistance for speedrunners' tastes, but this SGDQ demonstration still includes a ton of wacky tricks that combine geometry clipping and otherworldly physics exploits—all boosted by Chief's immediate access to a new grappling hook item. Sure, the hook makes players move much faster through the world, but it also figures into a wild glitch that makes players bounce off explosive barrels in ways that defy gravity.
Thunder in Paradise, 1995, all-cutscenes run
We're not sure whether this is GDQ's first speedrun dedicated to a full-motion video (FMV) game, but it's certainly one of the dumber examples of the mid-'90s CD-ROM genre. Thunder in Paradise is based on the short-lived TV series of the same name, which starred Terry "Hulk" Hogan alongside Jack Lemmon's son as a crime-solving action duo on the beach, and it was as bad as that sounds. The video game version, relegated to the CD-I console, forces players to watch excruciatingly bad live-action footage between light gun shootout sections.
In most video game speedruns, players skip as many cinema scenes as possible, but GDQ elected to show this game's filmed footage in its entirety while cheesing the gun gameplay parts as quickly as possible. Strap in, brother.
Rolled Out!, 2021, "challenge" run
Every GDQ event has at least one out-of-nowhere inclusion of a snappy indie game, and Rolled Out! takes that crown in this year's installment. At its core, this game shamelessly lifts its mechanics from Sega's Super Monkey Ball series, but we'd rather see a faithful indie game in the "marble rolling" genre than the iffy SMB anniversary game that Sega launched in late 2021. Rolled Out! takes the genre in some interesting directions, including things like button-pressing puzzles and gravity-reversal sections. I appreciated learning about this game by watching a fan combine high rolling speeds and precise aerial maneuvers.
King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!, 1992, any-percent run
Unlike twitchy shooters and precision-based platformers, any speedrun of a point-and-click adventure from PC gaming's yesteryear is a matter of optimizing its interface. Keyboard shortcuts and quick mouse fetching must be applied to perfect a game's puzzles and paths, which this GDQ run demonstrates—even if that means skipping as much of the dialogue and world-building content as possible. Still, if you're the kind of Ars Technica reader who has King's Quest games memorized, this wickedly fast playthrough may set off waves of nostalgia as your memory fills in the gaps between each rapid-fire click through a crowded inventory panel.
Final Fantasy VI, 1994, "randomizer" race
The universe of randomized classic games has exploded in the past few years, and we've previously profiled how community members patched older games to shuffle essential elements and breathe new life into their old gameplay. This version of Final Fantasy VI, dubbed Worlds Collide, transforms the game into an open-world exploration adventure, where players get instant access to an airship but must otherwise hunt for required items and objectives.
This week's GDQ demonstration pits four speedrunners against each other, all starting from the same randomization "seed," and it shows how wildly players' paths can diverge in their attempts to solve the same never-before-seen puzzles. While one runner manages to handily surpass his competitors, the race eventually reaches a fever pitch when two other runners wind up in a neck-and-neck race to the finish line.
What about your favorites?
There's no shortage of additional Summer Games Done Quick 2022 speedruns to pick through, with more live videos on the charity organization's YouTube channel every hour, so we look forward to your comments below about particular favorites. As an example, one of my favorite speedruns still hasn't gone live on YouTube as of press time: a Stepmania exhibition, which demanded that two players share the same Dance Dance Revolution-like series of buttons and literally dance around each other. The result, as aired on Thursday night, resembled a rave twist on ballroom dancing.
While we're stepping away for the Independence Day holiday this weekend, the gaming brain trust at Ars will continue tuning into GDQ over the next couple of days, whether to see Elden Ring get broken wide-open in an any-percent run or to see how the heck someone can pull off a "max speed, very hard" run through the stupidly fast F-Zero GX. To check out the series' remaining schedule, click here.
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