The Life of Speedrunners with (and without) GamesDoneQuick

Understanding the importance of speedrunning’s biggest event through those involved in it, and those left out.

Viewers celebrate during puwexil’s run of Final Fantasy VI at SGDQ 2018| Photo: GamesDoneQuick

Early in the morning on January 7th, 2016, Steven Eisner beat himself up over a terrible performance. Eisner, better known as Keizaron, had just wrapped up a speedrun of the old Game Boy Color game Animorphs in only 44:43, but it felt like everything that could possibly go wrong did just that. Within the first minute, he lost a battle and had to restart. The game froze. Enemies, which wandered around randomly, blocked him at every turn. When he finally arrived at the first boss, his party wasn’t strong enough to beat it. Each time he lost the battle, the game would restart just before the boss, not letting him level up or get a stronger party. After agonizing and hoping that he would get lucky enough to win, he had to restart the game and cut his run short.

Normally Eisner wouldn’t have hesitated to restart the game after such a poor start, but he was on a tight 40-minute schedule. He was sitting at the front of a hotel ballroom in front of hundreds of people, while thousands more were watching him fail live on Twitch as part of the speedrunning marathon Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) in Herndon, Virginia. His game wrapped up a special seven-hour section of the week-long charity event where players blasted through games that were terribly designed — a spectacle aptly called Awful Games Done Quick — and Animorphs lived up to the title.

In preparation for the run, Eisner had enlisted fellow streamer Shenanagans to help with live commentary, and they’d both practiced ahead of time so that they could stay entertaining. When the run was reset that January morning, the duo reset their commentary as well, throwing the audience into a fit of laughter. Every time something went wrong, which seemed to be about every ten seconds, they just shook their heads and leaned into the awfulness of the game, a Pokemon knockoff released in 2000 based on Scholastic’s popular book series.

Finally, Eisner finished his run, four minutes over his estimate and without completing the game’s final mission. The live crowd cheered and applauded along with Eisner, but all he felt was failure.

When he returned to his home in Spokane, Washington, he logged onto his Twitch channel and was amazed to see that his follower count had more than doubled.

“It was terrible, it’s an awful game” said Eisner in an interview on Discord, “But that crappy run from that crappy game got me about 1,500 followers. That’s kind of what helped me take off as a streamer so I was able to continue and incorporate speedrunning as my main job.”

The next summer, Eisner returned to a GamesDoneQuick event with one of his main games, Pokemon HeartGold, eager to have a good performance and show everyone that the Animorphs run was a fluke. Unfortunately, Eisner seems to have been cursed by the gods of speedrunning. That run also went extremely sideways, but Eisner’s sarcasm and improvisation won over the audience, again. The run racked up more than 400,000 views on YouTube and gained Eisner another 10,000 followers on Twitch. Eisner could now comfortably do what he always wanted to do, quit his awful day jobs and stream video games full-time. This was the life-changing magic of GamesDoneQuick.

The humble beginnings and exponential growth of GamesDoneQuick

Anyone can beat a video game, but speedrunning is about taking that to the extreme; beating the game as fast as possible. What started as a series of challenges from fans of Doom and Quake in the mid 90’s turned into one of today’s most well-known and dedicated gaming subcultures. That explosion in popularity can be tracked parallel to, and party because of, the growth of a small organization called GamesDoneQuick (GDQ).

In the minds of many, speedrunning is GDQ, but the two weren’t always synonymous. The inaugural event was imagined in 2010 by a group of forum users of the main speedrunning website of the time, SpeedDemosArchive. They were fans of games, of course, but also of up and coming event shows like Desert Bus for Hope and TheSpeedGamers. These were gaming marathons that raised money for charity and felt like variety shows, with entertaining personalities and MC’s, while games were played in the background. People warmed to the charities and they received positive media attention, but users over at SpeedDemosArchive like Andrew Schroeder, better known as romscout, wanted more.

“We enjoyed the charity aspect of course, but we love the games, we wanted to see them played well,” said Schroeder over a Discord call, “Maybe we can try this and make the games the focal point.”

What happened next is well-known GDQ history: a group of SDA forum users organized their own event, dubbed Classic Games Done Quick, for the main hall of the music and gaming convention MAGfest. Unfortunately, streaming in 2010 was still a logistical nightmare for most individuals, let alone an unprepared convention and hotel. When the team arrived to the Hilton hotel in Alexandria, Virginia that January 1st for the convention, they realized the setup didn’t work. Schroeder estimates they managed to stream one frame every ten seconds, more akin to a PowerPoint than a game.

Thankfully, one of the main organizers, Mike Uyama, offered to host the event in his house. He already had a streaming setup in his basement, and got quick permission from his mother to have 20 strangers over. Three hours after the intended start time, the team managed to stream their first speedrun, the NES classic Mega Man, to viewers around the world.

“We didn’t have audio for another hour, but that was fine,” said Schroeder, “We finally got a game feed.”

One of the speedruns from the first GDQ event, Classic Games Done Quick.

Classic Games Done Quick raised $10,000 for the charity CARE in three days. The organizers immediately set to planning the next event, and a year later, the first Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) raised $50,000 over five days. The success was overwhelming, and the small team of forum-goers saw the demand for more GDQ, so they added a summer event in Utah called Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ).

Around the same time, a new platform called Twitch was also growing in popularity, and GDQ quickly chose it as their streaming platform of choice. The events grew from basements to hotel rooms, from a few hundred viewers to more than a hundred thousand, and from raising $50,000 for charities to more than $1 million.

“That was a very surreal moment for the community, you can’t believe it,” said Schroeder. “That event really drove home the camaraderie and closeness that the community had, even as it was starting to expand quite a bit.”

Runners get interviewed during a relay race of Super Mario 64 at the ESA Summer 2018, one of the marathons influenced by GDQ | Photo: European Speedrunner Assembly

As GDQ grew, so did the speedrunning community. Thousands flocked to Twitch to check out their favorite games being demolished. New speedrunning charity marathons started, including the European Speedrunner Assembly in 2012 and RPG Limit Break in 2015, inspired by GDQ and serving a growing demand for more marathons and a greater variety of games. In turn, the growing wave of gaming marathons were inspiring new generations of speedrunners, like Cameron Mohr.

After majoring in music, Mohr had been bouncing from job to job, working at a car auction, then a call centre, trying to find something to do. One night in January of 2013, he was hanging out at a friend’s apartment when he heard about GDQ.

“My friend’s brother came out to the living room and said ‘I’m watching these guys play through Metroid Prime with a timer on screen and they’re trying to beat it as fast as they can,’” said Mohr over a Discord call, reminiscing.

“Wait, there’s a whole community of people that grew up playing the same video games as me, and now they’re just trying to play them really really well? That’s awesome, I want to get involved with this.”

Another year would pass before Mohr, better known as MunchaKoopas, would try his hand at speedrunning. He was taken by an indie game released around the same time called Shovel Knight and became one of the game’s most prolific runners, appearing at multiple GDQ events. “Speedrunning was my escape from my regular boring life.”

Speedrunning is a great hobby for potential game testers

The growing popularity of GDQ put the charity marathon on a lot of people’s radars. If you performed a speedrun at a GDQ event, thousands of Twitch viewers would learn about your stream. For Eisner and Mohr and many other runners, this meant potential followers and subscribers. Unexpectedly, it also led to employment opportunities from game developers.

“We saw this name pop up in chat, ShaneYCG,” recalled Mohr, who was on a friend’s stream at the time, “We looked at the name really close and were like ‘wait, does that stand for Yacht Club Games?’”

Yacht Club Games made Shovel Knight, the game Mohr was an expert in playing. Many developers don’t take kindly to speedrunners, annoyed at players skipping over their hard work and exploiting glitches they didn’t have time to fix. Luckily for Mohr, Yacht Club Games were big fans. They started getting in contact with the top speedrunners of Shovel Knight, and during Mohr’s run of Shovel Knight at SGDQ 2015, some of the developers surprised the audience by calling in with live commentary. Then, they gave Mohr an opportunity.

“They had asked me and a couple of other runners if we wanted to be on the list for playtesting,” said Mohr. It wasn’t a paid position, but Mohr and a few other runners got to be some of the first testers for Shovel Knight’s downloadable content, Plague Knight.

“They said ‘Hey, we have this, you can try it and let us know what you think.’”

At the time, Mohr was still working odd jobs, and still struggling to build a successful Twitch channel, but he kept speedrunning Shovel Knight . By the start of 2017, that perseverance had paid off into a full-time gig working Quality Assurance for the developer of his favorite game.

“In January I worked remotely as a tester to help them finish the Spectre of Torment DLC,” said Mohr. “That really helped them see that, yeah, I can do it if I can get there.”

“Anybody can find bugs, but I’m a little bit better at it, just because I’m very familiar with the way the game works at its core. I’m familiar with how the game should feel, with enemy behavior.”

The developers behind Celeste also embrace speedrunning, joining in on the couch commentary during this race during SGDQ 2018.

Yacht Club Games isn’t the only company to tap the potential of speedrunners. At AGDQ 2015, Naughty Dog’s popular PS3 game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was blitzed through in just over 50 minutes. What was supposed to be a cinematic, narrative experience became a hilarious mess of glitching through walls and launching up buildings. The runner was Daniel Leonard, known as the speedrunner Ovendonkey. He’d only picked up the game after seeing his friend try out the speedrun, and when that friend had to cancel on their GDQ run, Leonard stepped in.

“Shortly after the marathon, a recruiter at Naughty Dog reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in testing Uncharted 4 after he saw me run the first game,” said Leonard over email.

After a round of interviews, he moved to California to work for Naughty Dog, and still works there today. It was something he never imagined possible, since speedrunning is just a hobby for most, but the skills he developed through it have helped him and others like him land a dream career.

“It’ll force you to be patient, to improve on your mistakes, optimize complicated sequences, perfect repetitive tasks, work out creative solutions to problems,” said Leonard. “I literally do speedruns as part of my job.”

He’s been a natural at the job, and even got to spend ten months at Santa Monica Studio to help with the acclaimed PS4 game God of War. He still goes to GDQ events as an attendee, and at AGDQ 2017 he managed to give someone the same opportunity he took only a few years earlier.

“I roomed with a speedrunner named Clay. We ended up having a sort of competition where we bought a bad game (Madagascar for the Nintendo Gamecube) and each tried to break it as much as possible. When I got home after the event, I referred him to my QA manager, and a few months later Clay moved to California to work at Naughty Dog with me.”

Organizing a large gaming marathon can also pad a resume

GDQ grew at a breakneck pace. What started as a series of events handled by a small forum community turned into a fully incorporated organization, Games Done Quick, LLC, in just five years. Those involved in the growth of the events, like Schroeder, got crash courses in event coordination and community management. They were also speedrunners in the own right, and Schroeder was regarded for being one of the best runners of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a game he was so good at he could beat it blindfolded.

When the GDQ team officially started doing biannual events, Schroeder became the Event Director for the summer marathons, SGDQ. Unfortunately, he also had to take over the role for AGDQ 2015 when the head of the organization, Mike Uyama, became very sick and was unable to work. Meanwhile, Twitch was growing in popularity, and so was Schroeder’s channel, and he managed became a full-time streamer. But his future wasn’t at GDQ, where he was growing increasingly busy, or even in streaming. It was at Twitch.

“We had connections with Twitch staff who would come into our chat during streams, so we visited the headquarters,” said Schroeder. “The moment I walked in there I thought, ‘I’m going to do whatever I can to work here.’”

Twitch was the biggest platform for streamers and esports, but at the time, they didn’t have an expert in the growing speedrunning and marathon scene. Schroeder crafted up a plan for working at Twitch: Who better to help than one of the best speedrunners and event organizers around? The pitch worked, and Schroeder became the speedrunning community manager on a contract basis. Within a year, he started working full-time, and now he’s the Director of Charity Partnerships at Twitch.

GDQ has come a long way. What started as an opportunity for speedrunning hobbyists to showcase their community for a good cause became a platform for starting careers. GDQ’s growth into an organization means dedicated volunteers can become staff and get paid for their efforts. When the events needed tech support, video teams, and event management, enthusiastic speedrunners stepped up to the plate. Not only did they get to participate in the events, but they gained extremely marketable skills, and some of them are employed by GDQ today. For speedrunners, GDQ was the dream.

The unknown difficulties of getting into GDQ

AGDQ 2019 doesn’t begin until tomorrow, but it has already set a new record for the organization. On September 4th, GDQ tweeted that they had received their highest number of run submissions: 1,742. After deliberating for a little less than a month, the selection committee released the final list: only 161 accepted games.

Anthony Calabrese is one of those hundreds who didn’t make the cut. Calabrese, who streams as AnthonyCaliber, speedruns Naughty Dog’s brutal survival action game The Last of Us. This year marks the seventh time he’s been rejected as a GDQ runner, and the hardest. GDQ submissions require concise details about the run, including the total time, potential incentives, and safety, as well as accompanying video. At first, Calabrese’s submissions were sparse in detail, with small bits of commentary. As his runs kept getting rejected, he put more effort into fine-tuning his submissions. Some people talk over their submission videos, but Calabrese pretended he was physically at a GDQ event for his latest submission. He commented on the run and explained tricks, pretending to be on the hot seat in front of thousands, doing whatever he can to stand out amongst the sea of submissions.

“I attended the most recent AGDQ. I know what to expect, I’ve seen it,” said Calabrese over a video call. “It made me want it even more, having been to one.”

Calabrese has the world record in the Grounded Glitchless category of The Last of Us but has yet to appear in a speedrun marathon.

When Calabrese stumbled onto the GDQ stream in 2015, he saw a golden opportunity for growth as a full-time streamer, but the odds seemed stacked against him. The game he runs is mature, with gore and cursing abound, characteristics he felt GDQ events often avoided to create a family-friendly vibe. He also runs The Last of Us in its toughest difficulty and without glitches, an unforgiving campaign of three hours, far longer than most GDQ runs.

But this year should’ve been his year. Naughty Dog released an incredible gameplay trailer for The Last of Us’s upcoming sequel, driving up interest in the game. GDQ was letting in more mature games, including the terrifying and gore-filled Resident Evil 7 at AGDQ 2018. His speedruns were almost fully optimized, regularly clocking in under three hours. And after attending the event in person and seeing what made a good run, he crafted a submission worthy of the charity marathon. Still, it wasn’t enough.

“I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up,” said Calabrese. “I could understand not getting accepted in the past because I was still a little younger, but I’m kind of reaching the end of my speedrunning journey here.”

GDQ publishes each event’s accepted and rejected games list publicly. Everyone finds out what games got in at the same time, whether they’re a fan eager to see their favorite game, or a speedrunner trying to make it big. Late at night on September 28th, the GDQ website updated with a complete list. The runs are color-sorted and searchable; accepted runs in green, bonus runs for donation incentives in blue, backup runners and games in orange, and rejected runs in a muted red.

Like a list of grades posted outside of class after a test, everyone rushes the website to see if they did well enough for GDQ. There is no feedback email, no metric of whether your submission just missed the cut or wasn’t even close.

“I almost wish they would let me know if it’s never going to get in,” said Calabrese.

“I don’t feel like I deserve this opportunity, I never want to think of it that way. But at the same time, this is my job and I’ve committed so much time [to it]. It’s an opportunity. And to make it in this business you got to take advantage of every opportunity.”

Faraaz Khan is another rejected GDQ runner. A variety streamer known for completing runs of From Software’s agonizingly difficult Dark Souls series without taking a single hit, Khan was naturally drawn to speedrunning.

“You have a hundred thousand people watching you… if only ten per cent of those people like you, you’ve got 10,000 who might check out your channel,” said Khan over a Discord call. “A lot of the main factor [for success] is exposure, and GDQ is one of those ways.”

Like Calabrese, Khan doesn’t know why his runs haven’t been accepted. The speedrunning community, and fans of GDQ, regularly speculate on why certain runs (and runners) seem to get preferential treatment. Some think that only a game’s top runners will get accepted. Others believe that games don’t make an appearance two events in a row, or that you have to submit a Nintendo game. From runners like Calabrese and Khan that were left out, to those that regularly appear at GDQ events like Eisner and Mohr, everyone has their own tinfoil hat theory.

“From what little I’ve been told, it sounds like it’s just a process,” said Eisner. “They’re constantly like, ‘Should we go with this? Should we not? How does this work with the schedule?’ GDQ’s been going on for almost a decade now. They want popular games that will capture people’s attention, but they don’t want to do the same exact thing over and over in fear of burnout.”

In lieu of explaining each submission rejected, GDQ’s website has a very robust submissions guide. Previous performances, competitive times, game popularity, and the safety of the run are all taken into account. Still, some runners feel that more clarification is needed. One rejected runner posted a screenshot on Twitter of their submission videos with zero views, wondering why the selections committee didn’t even give them a chance.

Khan, whose submission video for AGDQ 2019 of Bloodborne has 39,000 views on YouTube, understands that the committee simply doesn’t have time to view every single submission anymore.

“They had around 103 days of footage submitted this time,” said Khan. “They can’t possibly go through all of that footage, there’s no way.

One of many discussions on social media on how GDQ has changed over it’s growth, and whether that’s for the best | ThaRixer

The pressure of being speedrunning’s biggest event

GamesDoneQuick events weren’t supposed to be the Olympics of speedrunning. In the early 2010s, speedrunning was a niche community, and early GDQ events reflected that nature. Most runners knew each other, attendance was small and mainly from within the community, and the mood was relaxed because of it. Everyone was there to hang out, crack jokes, and watch their favorite games being played, and the formula worked. So well, in fact, that it grew beyond what any of the GDQ team, like Schroeder, could have possibly expected.

“In terms of speedrun events, it is THE thing, because it started the first gathering for speedrunning,” said Schroeder. “Just like PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is going to be that for anyone interested in comics and gaming as a fan.”

“For a lot of people, it’s the Superbowl of speedrunning. You know it’s going to happen every year, and people outside of the activity are going to be talking about it.”

As the event continued to grow, the small crew of organizers kept scrambling to adjust. They worked with Twitch to handle the large amounts of viewers, they found larger venues to accommodate ballooning attendance requests, and they partnered with charities to establish a more consistent structure.

None of them knew how run events for thousands of people, or manage organizations in the public eye. They were learning on the fly, but often found themselves struggling to keep pace with the speedrunning community at large. Shortly after SGDQ 2015, Schroeder was removed from the GDQ organization, and rumors leapt up that he was fired amidst bad blood between himself and the rest of the organizers. In actuality, he wanted to focus on his role at Twitch full-time and passed on his duties as GDQ’s Event Director.

“We weren’t very good at communicating that there was a shift in staff,” said Schroeder. “I had just hired a PR person that year.”

Even after leaving the organization, Schroeder feels for the scrutiny faced by many of his friends. Over the past few years, GDQ staff has been paid by their partner charities, the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. As non-profit organizations, their expenses to GDQ are public information, but social media posts about a lack of GDQ transparency and stealing money arise during each event.

More recently, a vocal group online feel that recent GDQ events censor runners, and that the organizers have taken the fun out of the event. Schroeder, as both a frequent runner and past director himself, instead sees the runners feeling the pressure of performing in front of gigantic crowds.

“There’s way more people watching [the runners] than there were five years ago,” said Schroeder. “They’re different from the old events, they’re on a bigger stage. People are more mindful that they want to appeal to a wider audience.”

“GDQ definitely doesn’t put restrictions on runners, other than very common-sense stuff like cussing and racial slurs. People take that, though, and turn it into ‘GDQ censors all the runners.’ Anything that’s big is going to have tabloid-level coverage.”

For its part, GDQ has worked at improving its communication practices with a very demanding community. Their website has extensive details on the rules of attending, submitting, and participating in the event. The PR team tries to stay active on social media and engage with their community. They attempt to address any issues and controversies in an open and transparent way, though like most organizations, it’s an ongoing learning process.

But on all fronts, the organization remains largely quiet about one thing: Why some games and runners get accepted to appear at GDQ, and why others are left out.

GDQ appearances are not a blueprint for success as a streamer

All of the speedrunners contacted for this piece agree on one thing: While a GDQ appearance boosts your exposure, it is far from a free pass to stardom. For a person to sustain themselves as a full-time streamer, or find their dream job helping design video games, they need to draw all the right cards.

“GDQ is not your get-out-of-jail free card,” said Eisner. “I know people that have done GDQ runs for several years that don’t have the numbers that I do.”

A big part of the puzzle is dedication. Mohr, who has appeared in numerous GDQs, struggled to build his stream before finding his calling in Yacht Club’s QA department. Like many aspiring streamers, he learned that not everyone is cut out to be an online entertainer.

“I don’t like to be on camera, it’s too much,” said Mohr. “Also, I’m not a variety streamer. I have no desire to play Fortnite or the newest Mario game to get views.”

Prospective streamers also have to contend with each other. On a platform where every viewer is fought over as a potential source of income, most agree that a channel is safe if it consistently has at least a couple hundred viewers. In a niche hobby like speedrunning, it’s even harder to stand out. Your game needs to be entertaining, you need to be competitive in your game’s leaderboards, and you need to build your brand.

“This is very much a 24/7 job, you have to keep up with your community,” said Eisner. “If I’m not sleeping, I’m working towards the stream in some way or another.”

Eisner doesn’t even recommend streaming full-time, even though it’s what he does for a living, because it’s not as simple as putting in the effort.

“It’s a stroke of luck thing, that’s what it’s always going to come down to,” said Eisner. “I think if you took my exact circumstances and applied them last year, I’d be working my regular job still.”

“There’s a ton of people that are really good speedrunners, that are really good personalities, that are super entertaining, but you can have all of that and still have really pitiful numbers because you didn’t get a stroke of luck.”

Cheese (left) and Puncayshun (right) compete in a live race of Super Mario 64 during SGDQ 2018 | Photo: GamesDoneQuick

The future of speedrunning events and moving away from GDQ

Even the most well-known speedrunners have to figure out how to transition their hobby into a career. It took Allan Alvarez, known as the speedrunner Cheese, years before he took his streaming career seriously. Alvarez holds two world record speedruns in Super Mario 64, one of the most popular games of all time. Since first getting a world record in 2015, Alvarez gained a lot of exposure. His Twitch channel started getting thousands of new followers a month, he had prime-time appearances in six GDQ events, and news outlets interviewed him on his accomplishments. To him, though, it was all just speedrunning and games. Not until this year, when he and three other speedrunners were sponsored by an esports organization, did he think about building a sustainable career.

“Just watching them and hearing how they take their streams so seriously as a business,” said Alvarez over Discord from his home in Spain, “It just made me realize it’s a business, I have to take this seriously.”

Alvarez started focusing more on sustaining his channel, including more consistent scheduling for his fans, and changing his streamer name from Cheese05 to Cheese for better branding. He also recognized the importance of appearances at events, especially after gaining more than 10,000 followers after appearing at SGDQ 2017. But Alvarez noticed that all speedrunning events felt the same, and he wondered whether the scene wasn’t starting to stagnate.

“The problem is that speedrunning doesn’t have other types of events,” said Alvarez. “They’re all charity events, and people are kind of getting tired of it.”

Alvarez is a big fan of GDQ and other charity marathons. He loves attending and running at events, how well-produced they’ve become, and what a great thing they’re accomplishing. But he noticed that most events in the speedrunning community feel like emulations of GDQ.

“By a long shot, people pretty much only rely on GDQ,” said Alvarez. “Speedrunning needs different things, and people are just doing the same things over and over again.”

Alvarez first got into speedrunning back in 2014 by watching two Super Mario 64 speedrunners, puncayshun and Siglemic, battle for a world record. After learning the game, he ended up getting the world record himself. He started submitting for GDQ events, where many of his runs were live races. In these races, anywhere from two to four runners would all start playing a game at the same time and try to beat it first, with the crowd eagerly cheering them on.

Naturally, he’s drawn to the competitive side of the community. When he heard about a new organization that embraces speedrunning’s competitive sporting nature called the Global Speedrun Association (GSA), he jumped on board.

“The competitive events, the prize pools, the tournaments, that’s what speedrunning needs,” said Alvarez.

Whereas charity marathons have limited windows of time, and can only dedicate one run for each game,the GSA plans to establish leagues and tournaments. They’re drawing in an audience by focusing on speedrunning’s biggest games at first, like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and have hosted tournaments where top speedrunners race each other in bracket formats. This month,they’ll launch leagues with scheduled matchups. Multiple speedrunners of a game will be able to participate and prove their worth, instead of having to fight over one spot. The established structure makes it easier to attract sponsors for prize pools, and fans can even bet on games in real time.

Alvarez feels that GSA has been extremely well-received from the community so far. The organization is still in its infancy, but after the first leagues start in the new year, they’ll be followed by a live playoff event organized for April. GSA is taking notes from e-sports competitions, with a long-term goal to build a sustainable structure for speedrunners wanting to pursue the hobby full-time.

“To allow competitive speedrunners to actually make a living speedrunning, that’s what I want to bring into the speedrunning world,” said Alvarez. “Just like how there are competitive Super Smash Bros players that are sent and signed by teams to win cash prizes.”

GDQ is much more than the livesteam. It is also an arcade, a meeting place, and a convention | Photo: GamesDoneQuick

No matter what happens, Alvarez plans to keep submitting to GDQ events and attending them. Regardless of what takes off next, all of the runners interviewed see a continuing place of importance for the event that put the scene on the map.

GDQ is not sitting idly, though, and seems to be figuring out its own future. This year marked the first time the organization held a third event in a year, a mini-marathon at the annual TwitchCon convention called GDQ Express, which may signal plans for organizing more than two annual events. The convention side of the events also grew, with panels offered for the first time at SGDQ 2018 and returning for tomorrow’s AGDQ, and the organization’s Twitch show GDQ Hotfix has continued to add new programming blocks, including news discussions and other event highlights.

Tomorrow, thousands will flood the Marriott Hotel in Rockville, Maryland to see their favorite speedrunners, watch some panels, and play tons of games. Thousands more will tune-in live on Twitch and YouTube to see games that took them hours to beat be destroyed in minutes. More than a hundred lucky speedrunners will have the privilege to perform for everyone watching, and thousands of other runners, like Eisner, Calabrese, and Alvarez, will be watching from the sidelines. At the end of the day, everyone seems to just be happy to have speedrunning on the map.

“We should be happy that there’s a big event for speed running at all,” said Calabrese. “Speed running, of all things! It’s such a niche thing.”

Calabrese sees another parallel to speedrunning other than sports; Vince Gilligan’s AMC series Breaking Bad. The show’s creator, Gilligan, crafted the final moments of the protagonist Walter White around the joy of being the best, and Calabrese gets the same joy every time he’s grinding to get a new record in The Last of Us.

“It’s something to be the best in the world at a thing, no matter what that thing is. Speedrunning. You didn’t beat it first, you’re not even the one who created the game, you’re just playing it. But when it comes to beating it as fast as you can, you’re the best.”

This piece was originally written and edited for a Feature Writing class at the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism. Special thanks to all the runners that agreed to be interviewed and helped out. Unfortunately, GamesDoneQuick did not reply to multiple interview requests.