Awesome Games Done Quick Sets Record-Breaking $2.26 Million, Not As Easy As It Looked

The Awesome Games Done Quick event week is basically a speedrunning marathon where gamers try to finish video games as fast as possible over the course of several days. The goal is to raise money for charity. This year’s AGDQ raised a whopping $2.26 million, which will go to the Prevent Cancer Foundation. While it may have looked fun and easy through the livestreams, a closer look at the event’s process revealed that this wasn’t the case at all.

The week-long marathon finished recently, which actually started last Sunday, January 7th. Several games were featured throughout the speed run slumber party, including Crash Bandicoot 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilds, Kotaku reports. In the case of the latter game, streamer Anatomyz was able to finish the main quest in an impressive four hours.

During the event, viewers were able to make donations that would go to the fund while interacting with the streamers and other viewers. This year’s total accumulated funds surpassed last year’s take, which stood at $2.22 million.

What really made the marathon a lot of fun was how the viewers who donated could make the streamers do certain things during the event. Subscribers could make the gamers take on bosses at certain orders, for example, which really helped in mixing things up by a lot.

As fun and exciting as the streamers made the event, however, it wasn’t all fun and games in the background. Ars Technica took a look at what the gamers had to do in order to prepare before and even throughout the event, seeing that a lot of work went into making sure that everything functioned as intended.

While it may not have seemed like it, keeping the streaming stable, the various donation methods working, and the countdown running took a lot of effort. The streamers actually had to prepare months ahead of the AGDQ, taking factors like the types of games and speed runs that they’ll need to conduct into consideration.