SGDQ 2026 is my speedrunning World Cup

Every summer, I look forward to this event with an impatience I usually save for very few things. Definitely not for the soccer World Cup being played on the same continent right now, even if France is the bookmakers' favorite¹. This Sunday, Summer Games Done Quick 2026 kicked off in Minneapolis. 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 Borders². Everyone has their church.

Finishing a game fast, then faster

Speedrunning fits in one sentence. You finish a game as fast as possible, with a stopwatch running. All the fun is in the details. Runners compete in categories with precise rules. Any%, where anything goes as long as the credits roll. Then 100%, where you have to collect everything. Glitchless, where exploiting any bug is off limits.

And bugs are the main tool of the trade. Whole communities spend years taking a game apart frame by frame, triggering situations the developers never imagined. One day, somebody figures out that a bomb placed on exactly the right pixel lets you walk through a wall and save twenty minutes. Those discoveries get pieced together into routes that runners then practice thousands of times, until their hands know the game better than their memory does.

Sport or art? I still haven't made up my mind. It takes the training discipline of one and the creativity of the other, plus a kind of group research you won't find anywhere else, since every record builds on years of shared discoveries. Watching someone play a game might already sound strange. So watching someone methodically take apart a game you spent forty hours finishing, I get that it's confusing. But it's the pleasure of a magic trick where they show you how it's done, and the wonder survives, because the trick still takes ten years of practice once you know the secret.

A week-long marathon for a good cause

Since 2010, the American organization Games Done Quick has run two big charity marathons a year, one in January and one in summer, streamed around the clock on Twitch and YouTube. Viewers donate during the runs, and their donations unlock challenges, bonus runs, or the right to name the save file. Basically, a telethon with controllers. And it works beyond all reason. The organization has given nearly $60 million to charities since it started³, including $2.44 million this past January for cancer prevention⁴.

This year's edition opened with a 102% run of Donkey Kong Country 2, just to set the tone. The schedule runs seven days, and fair warning, it's unreasonable.

Link's Awakening, my pocket-sized Everest

My respect for runners isn't theoretical, because I've tried it. My testing ground was The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, a game I played to death for years and thought I knew screen by screen. The community has documented ridiculously elegant shortcuts in it, including a trip through the doghouse that teleports Link across the island⁵. I figured I had a head start.

Well. Mostly I discovered the canyon between finishing a game with your eyes closed and finishing it fast. Every screen has its ideal path, every menu its trick to shave off a second, and putting it all together takes a precision my hands have never been willing to give me. I came away with a time I will not be sharing and a lasting admiration for the people who keep that pace up for an hour, live, in front of a packed room.

Speedrunning speaks French too

For a long time a thing of American conventions, the charity marathon found its French standard-bearer in SpeeDons, hosted by streamer MisterMV. The 2026 edition raised more than 2.3 million euros for Doctors of the World in Lyon this May, a national record⁶. The hobby is slowly stepping out of its niche, and I definitely plan to come back to it in other articles, because nothing else gives me this mix of ingenuity, patience, and virtuosity.

So yes, the World Cup is in full swing and France has a star to chase, and I won't snub it. But if one night this week you're torn 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. You might lose the whole night.

Update, July 12. That's a wrap in Minneapolis. SGDQ 2026 ended Saturday night with more than $2.4 million raised for Doctors Without Borders⁷. The counter was under $1.5 million on the morning of the last day, which brought in nearly a million on its own and unlocked two bonus runs along the way. Turns out the audience knows how to finish fast too.

Notes

1. Bookmakers rank France first among the favorites of this 48-team World Cup, hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico through July 19, as Eurosport reports (in French). ↩

2. July 5 through 11, 2026, at the Hilton in Minneapolis, streamed nonstop on Twitch and YouTube, as Engadget details. ↩

3. That's $59.8 million since 2010, according to Game Developer. ↩

4. Awesome Games Done Quick 2026, held in Pittsburgh in January, raised $2.44 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, as GameSpot reports. ↩

5. The categories, the rules, and the famous doghouse are all documented on speedrun.com. Yes, the doghouse. Speedrunning is a hobby where that sentence counts as technical documentation. ↩

6. Exactly 2,344,688 euros collected from May 7 to 10, 2026, at the Amphithéâtre in Lyon, according to AFJV (in French). ↩

7. The still-provisional total hovered around $2.41 million the day after the finale, as Eurogamer and Shacknews report. ↩