Summer Games Done Quick charity speedrun marathon kicks off Sunday

Speed Demos Archive, an online collective and host for video game speedruns, announced that its next streamed charity marathon will begin this Sunday and extend through June 29, in partnership with SpeedRunsLive and Twitch.

Next week's Summer Games Done Quick marathon will raise money for the Doctors Without Borders charity, with viewer donations going toward a number of featured incentives, challenges, and prize raffles. The organization's January event Awesome Games Done Quick raised more than $1 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, attracting over 100,000 simultaneous viewers during peak hours.

Featured games include The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, and a grueling seven-hour trek through Final Fantasy 6. A full schedule is available here.

[Image: Speed Demos Archive]

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Summer Games Done Quick Returns June 22nd to Raise Funds for Doctors Without Borders

Annual speedrun-driven charity event to feature more than a hundred video games and gamers during weeklong livestream on Twitch

DENVER- June 19, 2014 - Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) returns to Twitch, the world's leading video platform and community for gamers, as it gathers hundreds of video game speedrunners to raise money for Doctors Without Borders. SGDQ 2014 – which is a collaborative venture by Speed Demos Archive and SpeedRunsLive with sponsorship from Twitch – takes place June 22-June 29. It will be broadcast live from the Crowne Plaza at the Denver International Airport with the marathon streaming on Speed Demos Archive's Twitch channel: www.twitch.tv/speeddemosarchivesda.

Speedrunning is the art of beating a video game as quickly as possible. It relies on tricks, extensive planning, high levels of play, and funky in-game interactions to result in one of the most compelling video game phenomena. Because of its appeal, previous Games Done Quick events have generated more than a million dollars.

With a game selection that spans decades, consoles, and genres, SGDQ 2014 will be one of the most diverse speedrunning marathons to date. Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Final Fantasy VI, Halo: Combat Evolved, and Octodad: Dadliest Catch, are a few examples of the more than 150 games which will be glitched, optimized, bopped, and blazed through as quickly as possible by the speedrunning community's top stars. Select classic runs, such as Zelda: Ocarina of Time, will require viewer donations for inclusion.

Some of the established speedrunners taking part are Cosmowright, Sinister1, SpikeVegeta, Essentia, with many more familiar and fresh faces alike. The full schedule and runner list is viewable here with more than a hundred gamers participating. SGDQ 2014 looks to springboard off the success of Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ), its sister-marathon. Last January, AGDQ 2014 raised $1,025,000 for Prevent Cancer during a week-long marathon, while smashing expectations as runners smashed records. This successful charity drive was backed by a fantastic surge in viewers, with peaks of over 100,000 spectators during the Minecraft and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim speedruns. These numbers more than doubled AGDQ 2013's fundraising and viewership with the growth expected to continue with SGDQ 2014.

Donations to Doctors Without Borders can be made directly to the charity via the viewing page available at http://gamesdonequick.com. Donors are entered to win community made prizes and have their comments read live on stream or via a ticker on the Games Done Quick frontpage. There are additional donation options available through a Twitch subscription to the Games Done Quick channel and purchasing Games Done Quick shirts via theyetee.com, with all profits from sales going towards fundraising causes.

SGDQ and AGDQ are the result of a joint venture between Speed Demos Archive and SpeedRunsLive, two of the speedrunning industry's most popular sites. For more updates, spectators are encouraged to follow the Speed Demos Archive twitter feed: @SDASpeedruns.

About Doctors Without Borders

Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) delivers emergency medical and humanitarian aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, natural disaster, or exclusion from health care in nearly 70 countries. On any one day, 27,000 doctors, nurses, logisticians, water-and-sanitation experts, and other qualified professionals can be found providing medical care in international teams made up of local MSF aid workers and their colleagues from around the world. In 1999, MSF was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

About Summer Games Done Quick

SGDQ is a joint-venture between Speed Demos Archive (SDA) and SpeedRunsLive (SRL). SDA is the premier community for video game speedruns, archiving more than 1,000 runs for over 900 games and featuring a vast speedrun knowledge database. SRL is the best site to race video games online against others. Players of all skill levels are encouraged to join, whether it's for competitive or casual racing.

About Twitch

Twitch is the world's leading video platform and community for gamers where more than 45 million gather every month to broadcast, watch and talk about video games. Twitch's video platform is the backbone of both live and on-demand distribution for the entire video game ecosystem. This includes game developers, publishers, media outlets, events, user generated content, and the entire esports scene. In February 2014, Wall Street Journal ranked Twitch as the 4th-largest website in terms of peak internet traffic in the U.S., fortifying the brand as an entertainment industry leader and the epicenter of social video for gamers. For more information visit: www.twitch.tv.