Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 Raises 3.13M USD For Charity
AGDQ2020 raised 3.13 million US Dollars for charity! After a grand total of 141 speedruns over the course of one week, they gathered a total of 35 thousand unique donors and a total of 54 thousand individual donations. AGDQ also handed out a total of 204 lucky draw and sweepstakes prizes.
For some of our newer readers, Awesome Games Done Quick is an annual event where speedrunners get together to raise money for charity. The annual event first started a decade ago. At that time, their goal was only $5000USD and even then, they managed to raise double that! Also notably, in recent years they have been donating their funds raised towards the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
If you don’t understand this beautiful culture about speedrunners, you can check out our previous article here where we gave a brief rundown about them. It’s fascinating (and kinda funny-ironic) to see a bunch of gamers try to play as little of the game as possible.
I think my favorite aspect of speedrunning is the amount of variants that you could run. Some of them are pretty unique to Twitch but I’ll briefly go over them. There are variants where the player might have to use a randomizer to determine their starting character, items or skills. Some variants (Bid War) let’s the viewers vote for which character the player will use, and this one is my personal fave, as it has that interaction between two communities (speedrunners and Twitch viewers). I’ve also seen some speedrunners do a run completely blindfolded. Total madlads.
Although the event is over, u/Kruulos on Reddit has compiled a comprehensive and wonderful thread about the top highlight runs from AGDQ2020. If you’re new, I highly recommend taking a look at some of these curated runs.
(Pictured: My favorite run, Kingdom Hearts with a character bid war)
Overall, congratulations are in order. AGDQ2020 raised that 3.13M USD for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. I find them to be an inspiration to everyone!