The Games Done Quick charity event series has long been a favorite among gaming fans and media critics because it blends classic, beloved video games with meticulously studied strategies to tear them apart in search of high-speed exploits.

This year’s summer installment is also noteworthy because it’s the first in 2.5 years to take place in a physical location—albeit with some of the most rigorous masking and distancing measures we’ve seen in a livestreamed public event in 2022. Even with precautions, the combination of players, commentators, and crowds in the same room has restored enthusiasm to its broadcasts, which is why we’ve compiled some of the best runs from the past week, as archived on GDQ’s Youtube platform.

Tunic 2022

If you haven’t yet played Tunic, experts recommend pausing before watching this game-changing, spoiler-filled journey through several of its key secrets. If you’ve already acquired the game’s myriad of secret “instruction manual” pages, consider this a must-watch because it features a riveting guest on real-time commentary: Andrew Shouldice, the game’s primary designer, programmer, and illustrator.

Shouldice observes a trick begin to play out at one point, telling the audience that he programmed it to be a possibility but could never directly trigger it. The speedrunner then showed the skill, allowing him to warp through a wall and avoid a slew of challenging content.

Final Fantasy VI 1994

Final Fantasy VI: Worlds Collide changes the experience into an open-world exploration adventure where players can immediately access an airship but must otherwise search for necessary materials and goals.
The GDQ demonstration this week sets four speedrunners against one another, all beginning with the same randomization “seed,” and it demonstrates how drastically different players’ routes can become when attempting to tackle the same previously undiscovered challenges. The race ultimately reaches a fever pitch as two other runners end up in a neck-and-neck battle to the finish line while one runner manages to easily outpace his rivals.

Halo Infinite 2021

Numerous vintage game speedruns fall into several types, with the most broken being known as “any-percent” runs, which let players to use any techniques and bypass any tasks they wish. These types of runs may be tedious to watch in some games, and the infamously glitchy Halo Infinite is no exception.

This speedrun starts with a demonstration of the “tank gun,” which attaches a gun with infinite ammo to Master Chief’s feet. That’s a little too much help for speedrunners’ tastes, but this SGDQ demonstration still features a slew of bizarre tactics combining geometry clipping and weird physics exploits, all helped by Chief’s immediate access to a new grappling hook item.

King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! 1992

Any speedrun of a point-and-click adventure from the golden age of PC gaming is simply a matter of improving the interface. To perfect a game’s puzzles and paths, keyboard shortcuts and quick mouse fetching must be used, as this GDQ run demonstrates—even if that means bypassing as much of the dialogue and world-building content as possible. If you know all the King’s Quest games by heart, this lightning-fast playthrough may bring back memories as your memory fills in the gaps between each rapid-fire click through a crammed inventory screen.