SGDQ 2026, my speedrunning World Cup

Summer Games Done Quick 2026 opened on Sunday in Minneapolis, where players from all over the world will take turns day and night until July 11, finishing video games as fast as humanly possible to raise money for Doctors Without Borders^[1]. I look forward to this event every summer with an impatience I grant to very few things, and certainly not to the soccer World Cup currently playing out on the same continent, even though my national team happens to be the bookmakers' favorite^[2]. We all worship somewhere.

Finishing a game fast, then faster

The idea fits in one sentence, since a speedrun is simply a playthrough against the clock. Everything interesting hides behind that sentence. Runners compete in categories with precise rulesets, like any%, where anything goes as long as the credits roll, 100%, which requires collecting everything, or glitchless, which bans exploiting bugs altogether. Bugs are the crown jewels of the discipline. Entire communities spend years dissecting a game frame by frame, forcing situations no developer ever imagined, discovering that a bomb placed on exactly the right pixel clips you through a wall and saves twenty minutes. Those findings get stitched into routes that runners then rehearse thousands of times, until their hands know the game better than their memory does.

I still can't decide whether speedrunning belongs with sports or with art. It demands the training discipline of the first and the creativity of the second, plus a collective research effort you won't find anywhere else, since every record stands on years of shared discoveries. Watching someone play a game may already sound odd, so I understand the confusion when the someone is methodically dismantling a game you spent forty hours finishing. Yet it delivers the pleasure of a magic trick performed with the curtain up, and the wonder survives, because the trick takes ten years of practice even after it's explained.

A week-long marathon for a good cause

Since 2010, the American organization Games Done Quick has run two big charity marathons a year, Awesome Games Done Quick in January and Summer Games Done Quick in the summer, streamed around the clock on Twitch and YouTube. Viewers donate during the runs, and donations unlock challenges, bonus runs, or the right to name the save file, which gives the evenings the feel of a telethon with controllers. The formula works beyond all reason. The organization has handed nearly 60 million dollars to charities since it started^[3], including 2.44 million raised this past January for cancer prevention^[4]. The edition that just opened kicked off with a 102% run of Donkey Kong Country 2, which sets the tone. The schedule covers seven days, and fair warning, it is unreasonable.

Link's Awakening, my pocket-sized Everest

My respect for runners is not theoretical, because I tried it myself. My proving ground was The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, a game I ground down for years and thought I knew screen by screen. The community has documented shortcuts of absurd elegance there, including a trip through the doghouse that teleports Link across the island^[5]. I figured I was starting with a head start, and instead I found the canyon between finishing a game blindfolded and finishing it fast. Every screen has an optimal path, every menu a maneuver that shaves off a second, and stringing it all together demands a precision my hands never agreed to provide. I walked away with a time I will not print and a lasting admiration for the people who hold that pace for an hour straight, live, in front of a full house.

Speedrunning speaks French too

Long the domain of American conventions, the charity marathon found a French standard-bearer in SpeeDons, hosted by streamer MisterMV, whose 2026 edition gathered more than 2.3 million euros for Doctors of the World in Lyon this May, a national record^[6]. The discipline is slowly outgrowing its niche, and I plan to keep writing about it, because nothing else gives me this particular blend of ingenuity, patience, and virtuosity.

So yes, the World Cup is in full swing and Les Bleus have a star to chase, and I will watch the matches. But if one evening this week you find yourself choosing between a match and a stranger walking through the walls of a game from your childhood in front of a roaring crowd, give the stranger five minutes. Don't blame me for the missing night of sleep.