The art of playing video games really, really fast

How to watch and enjoy the Olympics of speedrunning—and do it for charity.

Run, Mario, run! | Illustration: James Bareham/MBH4H

Welcome back! 2025 has begun and it’s already been a pretty long year. The Golden Globes has jumpstarted Oscar season anew. Las Vegas has been overrun in equal parts by robots and those who love them. Wrestling went global just in time for everyone to see Hulk Hogan getting booed by his own alma mater. Too much has been said about Greenland (not linking any of that). But for my money, the best way to start the year is watching people beat video games very quickly—and often in very wild ways—in a charity event staged to say fuck cancer.

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One more last-minute thing: As we write this, wildfires are continuing to spread across Los Angeles, impacting thousands—including many of our friends. Local outlets like NBC4, ABC7, and The Los Angeles Times are tracking the many ways you can help donate. Thank you, and now back to the essay.

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For 15 years, Awesome Games Done Quick has kicked off January with a weeklong charity drive that celebrates speedrunning, which is to say, beating video games as fast as possible. (AGDQ 2025 is currently happening through this Sunday, and I humbly encourage you to check it out.) But even that description, however technically accurate, doesn’t do the speedrunning community justice.

Let's use Elden Ring, for example, both because it's an extremely popular game known for its difficulty and because I know it's one of James’ favorites. Everyone who plays Elden Ring has the same start and the same final boss. Barring a few critical moments, how you get to the ending is entirely up to you. On average, it takes players 60+ hours to beat the game—and more than twice that if they want to experience everything the game has to offer.

A speedrunner, in contrast, can get to the end of the game in under one hour in what is called an "Any% glitchless run," which means there are no major game-breaking shortcuts used and there are no prerequisite to-dos other than what’s absolutely necessary. There are myriad different subcategories for Elden Ring, though Any% Glitchless is one of its most popular. Skimming through the game’s Speedrun.com page, you can find record times ranging from five hours for completionist runs ("All Achievements Glitchless") all the way down to under four minutes to beat the game by exploiting any pre-existing, arguably game-breaking "skips" ("Any% Unrestricted Zips"). Even the longest listed runs are but a fraction of the average player’s experience.

To be sure, these are extremely skilled humans working within the confines of the game itself. But they don't work in isolation. A game like Elden Ring has a huge community around it working together to discover little efficiencies, whether they are inbounds (within the planned confines of the game) or whether they involve finding ways to escape the geometry of the game by “clipping” through the tiniest fissure of its environment, or breaking the physics through extremely precise (think: milliseconds) button combinations. These frame-perfect skips are then collated into out different optimized "routes" that balance efficiency with predictability—a very difficult skip, for example, may require such split-second perfection that only a select few even dare to try it, lest they mess up an otherwise great run.

Speedrunning, in effect, is a form of careful choreography, following a script co-written by hundreds hoping to nail every move so well that they scratch seconds off their personal best time over the course of many, many attempts. And new exploits can happen years after release, upending everyone’s scores by creating even better efficiencies and faster routes.

Games Done Quick is a showcase of all these efforts, livestreamed on Twitch with VOD replays on YouTube. It is the single best way to enjoy speedrunning. Few world records are broken during a GDQ event, but that isn’t to say they don’t come close—and to be sure, there have been some records broken every year. What makes GDQ special is that all the runners and their supportive commentators (who literally sit on a couch just a few feet behind them) often take the time to explain everything that’s happening mid-game, both planned and otherwise. The runners, who also narrate and explain their tricks as they play, perform with a crowd of hundreds behind them cheering at just the right times to really underscore impressive moments, as well as provide support for heartbreaking mistakes. (It’s a very loving week.)

Any given GDQ event features hundreds of runs spanning gaming’s history, and while many follow the traditional speedrun categories, the best get very, very weird—it is a performance showcase, after all, and absent the pressure to break a world record, the players like to show off and have fun. A sampling of what you can see at any given GDQ event, both from this week’s event as well as some of my favorites from the past:

• A semi-competitive race between four NES Super Mario Bros. players, with their characters all mapped to the same screen so you can see in real time how close they are to one another.

• The notoriously challenging Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, beaten in just two hours while blindfolded. (Again, sorry James.) Blindfolded runs are a common occurrence.

• Two players completing a very glitch-heavy The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sharing the same controller.

• An unfathomably challenging “kaizo remix” of Super Mario World in just over an hour. Kaizo games are an art in their own right.

• Super Mario 64 “Drum%” in 23 minutes… yep, you guessed it, the drumset is a controller

• A dog beating Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB — this one isn’t particularly fast, but again, it’s a dog playing a video game.

… Even as I finish this essay, someone decided to speedrun New Super Mario Bros. Wii while playing the soundtrack on piano, with controllers attached to his head and feet—and to finish off his performance, he decides to blindfold himself for a level. It’s as if all the top NBA players decided to be Harlem Globetrotters for a week to raise money for a good cause.

And the charity part is truly substantial: Over $50 million has been raised since 2010, with the two biggest recipients being the Prevent Cancer Foundation (for this January’s AGDQ) and Doctors Without Borders, the big recipient of GDQ’s other major annual event, Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ). Audiences can donate however much they want with the option to have a note read on the stream. There’s also an incentive system that allows donors to put their thumb on the scale, whether it’s renaming an in-game character or shifting the speedrun difficulty.

A big part of what we want to do with MBH4H is celebrate human spirit and creative ingenuity, and if you want to see some of the best video game players come together to show off for a good cause, there are a few better places than Games Done Quick. AGDQ runs through Sunday, January 12th, so check it out if you can. On Saturday, someone is going to be beating Elden Ring with a saxophone. I can’t wait to find out how.