You can keep your all-night bacchanals, oversized disco ball in Times Square, and drunken renditions of “Auld Lang Syne.” There’s no better way to ring in the new year than with Awesome Games Done Quick. Its counterpart, Summer Games Done Quick, marks the start of a season when most of us should be outside soaking up sunshine, but why do that when you can stay inside where it’s cool and watch pro players such as CarcinogenSDA do what they do best?

More commonly known as AGDQ and SGDQ, respectively, both gaming marathons feature speedrunners showcasing their skills in front of a live audience, while more viewers watch from home. Each marathon runs 24 hours a day for seven days; a schedule posted online breaks down which games will be featured and when. Besides experts dissecting new and classic games, GDQ raises money for charities by encouraging viewers to donate while runners play. Incentives for reaching donation milestones vary from adding games to the schedule to forcing speedrunners to play by certain rules. Most games are played by a single runner; others pit two or more players in races to see who can roll credits first.

CarcinogenSDA's popular run of Resident Evil 7 at AGDQ 2018.

Although GDQ started small—early events emanated from founder Mike Uyama’s basement—it’s now common for hundreds of players to converge on AGDQ and SGDQ, and for tens of thousands of viewers to stay glued to the 24/7, week-long stream. Everybody wins: Viewers get to watch some of the best players in the world break down some of the most challenging games ever made, and have a chance of hearing their donations, which they can customize with messages, read aloud; charities such as Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Foundation typically receive between one and three million dollars; and pros such as CarcinogenSDA get the chance to catch up with peers they rarely see in person and, just as importantly, strut their stuff for viewers who might not have known them before their epic showcase.

Not just anyone can perform at a GDQ event. Organizers receive thousands of pitches during every submission period. To catch their attention, a run has to either be a popular recurring game, such as Super Metroid, or particularly awe-inspiring. Carci is no stranger to GDQ. He’s piloted games from Resident Evil VII (one of his most popular runs to date) to Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

While Carci is an excellent speedrunner, he’s built his reputation around completing games, particularly Resident Evil titles, without so much as an undead tooth mark. “Whenever I submit a run, I record a live commentary video, and I show how the live commentary would go, and places where the organizers could stop to read donations,” he says. “Once I’m done, I attach it in the submission form. You can submit up to 10 different categories or up to five different games. It’s basically a programming block on TV, and they have to choose games that will have the biggest impact.”

The Resident Evil franchise remains a fixture at GDQ events. “They usually put one or two in there, often something a little more old-school style and something a little more modern.” For AGDQ 2024, he packaged a submission that fell on the modern side: a no-damage playthrough of 2019’s Resident Evil 2, a remake of the 1998 PlayStation One classic. It’s been a critical and commercial success since its release, and while it’s been featured it in various categories at past GDQ shows, no one has completed a no damage run on the big stage.

Not in a Resident Evil game. Not in any game, ever.

That’s not to say no one has played games and emerged unscathed outside of Games Done Quick. Twitch streamer “The Happy Hob” played all five of FromSoftware’s “Soulsborne” games available at the time—Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 1-3, and Bloodborne—without a single dent in his armor.. Carci has completed virtually every Resident Evil game without getting hit, including the 2002 Resident Evil remake with invisible enemies enabled. The thing is, many of his runs, especially those of the RE2 remake, are segmented. That means he saves every so often so he can reload from that point if he gets hit. That’s by design. Most of the time he’s not trying to complete a no damage playthrough without saving. He captures a segmented run, records commentary over it, and uploads it to YouTube as a video walkthrough.

Even if you’re recording a segmented run, finishing a game without taking damage requires perfect mechanical control (movement, dodging, jumping, and other verbs unique to a game); memorization of things like puzzle solutions and enemy positions; a knowledge of special operations such as triggering scripted events that do things like add enemies or block off areas; and knowing where to go and mapping out a route that gets you there safely. Efficiency is an added variable for GDQ. At home, you can play ultra-conservatively by inching your way from a game’s start to its ending. At GDQ, every run is expected to be completed quickly. It’s called Games Done Quick for a reason. The event’s speedrun-focused theme is as functional as it is performative. “When I submit, I include a safe estimate,” Carci says. “Usually, I take my best time and add about seven minutes to it. There might be some mistake where I completely forgot to do something or pick something up and have to backtrack. If that happens, we can fill what would otherwise be dead air by reading some donations while I fix my mess.”

Runners have to focus their allotted time in the schedule into their performances. “Sometimes I might find little optimizations that don't lower the chance of a successful no damage run, but the strats you use would end up being riskier,” says Carci. “The faster you go, the riskier the strat. I don't want the pressure and the expectation of getting a world record on top of clearing a game without taking a hit. I want to keep it fun for myself, and my idea of fun these days is: make the run quick, make it efficient, but above all, make the run able to be achieved by anyone by making the strategies accessible.”

All of those factors sum up why Carci chose Resident Evil 2 Remake as the game to impress GDQ organizers. “It’s a game that I have been able to make mechanically consistent. I did this with the help of my friend MattDaRoc.”

MattDaRoc comes from Carci’s audience. The two became friends after they collaborated on charting efficient routes through Resident Evil titles with no damage in mind. Carci credits him as one of the first players to finish Resident Evil 3’s remake, released in 2020, without taking a hit. “He absolutely shreds Resident Evil games,” Carci says. “He's doing these back-to-back-to-back, taking no hits, which is just nuts. I'm not in the headspace these days where I can do that; I work on games one at a time, but Matt is super-dedicated. I'm happy to have a friend like Matt.”

The more Resident Evil installments they played, the more Resident Evil 2 Remake seemed Carci’s best choice for a GDQ run. “We discovered the most consistent strategies for Resident Evil 2 Remake. I was really surprised to figure out how consistent of a game it is. I wouldn't say it's easy, but compared to most no damage playthroughs you could do of Resident Evil games, the route is very easy to replicate.”

Carci has completed unsegmented runs of RE games, but playing at home differs from playing in front of a live in-person and livestream audience. If he makes even the smallest error while playing live at GDQ, it could hurt the reputation he’s spent over 10 years building. “This run is a test of everything Matt and I have worked on. It’s me asking myself, can I do this? Can I get on stage and do this?”

To do the run on command, Carci would have to polish his skills until they gleamed.

After GDQ accepted his submission, Carci spent nearly all of his schedule streams leading up to the January 2024 event going through everything he and MattDaRoc had tested. That meant committing every room, every corridor, every item location, every boss strategy, every movement to memory, yet also being able to adjust on the fly should the run go sideways. He was less worried about playing in front of a crowd than he was checking off every box of his route. “I've been doing GDQ events since 2011, back when they only had, like, 3000 viewers. As the viewer count mounted, it didn’t bother me. I’ll be bouncing off of my commentators and talking about the strats and trying to keep my head in the game.”

Performance anxiety should be expected before taking any stage. The ability to sublimate that anxiety makes performers like Carci a pro. “I sort of view the live crowd as an enhancement to my enjoyment of what's going on. That’s how I rationalize it: I'm there to show people this game, and to share my joy of it.” And just in case, he would be making safety saves at key areas during his run. “I will be playing on hardcore mode. Hardcore mode in Resident Evil 2 Remake means that if you die, you get sent all the way back to the beginning of the game, or to your last saved game. If I do not make safety saves, then I won’t be able to finish the game. That would probably be a bigger catastrophe than taking damage.”

His choice of character—rookie cop Leon Kennedy or college-student-turned-scrappy-survivor Claire Redfield—was an added complexity. “Leon has certain parts of the Raccoon Police Department he goes through, and Claire has certain parts of the RPD she goes through, both in specific orders,” he says. One diversion occurs approximately one-third of the way through the campaign, when each character finds a different key. “Leon’s path to Club-key doors takes him in one direction while Claire goes to Heart-key doors from another. This is happening for both of them while being chased by Mr. X.”

Routing was only one source of added complexity. The other was that the AGDQ viewers, not Carci, would choose his avatar. He and GDQ were planning a donation bidding war between Leon and Claire. The character who received the most donations before his run kicked off would be the character he played. That meant he’d need to prepare for both.

Claire and Leon get their hands on unique weapons, too—for Leon, a shotgun, magnum, and flamethrower; and for Claire, a grenade launcher capable of firing acid and flame rounds, a handgun attachment that allows her to fire scarce magnum ammunition (whereas Leon can mix gunpowder to craft as many magnum bullets as he wants), a submachine gun, and the spark shot, essentially an electric chair weaponized into a firearm. Even their starting handguns and the arcs of their knife swings are different. “The working theories are similar, but the approach differs because of the weapons. Leon's guns are punchier and more about getting critical hits. Claire's guns are more about shutting the enemy down. So, you’re not playing a completely different game with each character, but it's different enough that your choice matters.”

Take Leon’s flamethrower and Claire’s flame grenades. Flamethrower damage accumulates the longer you spray on an enemy, but it starts low enough that roasting even a single zombie takes time, leaving it best suited for boss encounters. Claire’s flame rounds explode on impact; that translates to lots of damage right away, followed by a slower accumulation over several seconds. “The general rule with Claire’s flame rounds is a single flame grenade, as long as it is a direct hit, will kill pretty much every zombie except the ones wearing fireproof gear. Leon’s shotgun is great against zombies, but until you upgrade it you have to get dangerously close.” The best way to kill a zombie with the shotgun is by getting up close and personal, aiming at their heads, and turning their heads into pulp. Getting close is as simple as walking up to them, but that’s risky for a challenge like Carci’s. “I pop zombies a couple of times in the leg with the handgun to stun them; that’s the window where you’re able to get close enough to aim the shotgun at their heads and decapitate them in one shot. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

These variables—the fact that character choice would be out of his hands, routing for paths Leon and Claire, the most effective strategies for each playable character’s sidekick (super spy Ada Wong for Leon and Sherry Birkin, a helpless pre-teen caught up in the plague outbreak, for Claire), tailoring all routes in a way that balances swiftness, efficiency, and safety—had to get worked out during his practice sessions.

As a fan of both Carci and Resident Evil, I watched the livestreams where he experimented and sharpened strategies with interest. I came away from many broadcasts more than a little concerned. There were areas where a zombie grabbed him seemingly out of nowhere, or when Mr. X, arguably the game’s most terrifying monster and the subject of countless internet memes and reaction videos, diverged from his usual behavior patterns and caught up to Carci on a route that should have circumvented the stalker. The game’s penultimate boss also broke patterns Carci and MattDaRoc believed they had down to a science.

Carci was more concerned than any of his viewers. There were practice streams where he grew stressed and frustrated. If he couldn’t perform to perfection at home, his GDQ run, and his reputation, would suffer a blow harder than Mr. X’s infamous left hook.

Most practice streams began by selecting Leon or Claire and going through their campaign from start to finish. As he identified problematic areas, he would pull up his save files and choose one at the location where he needed tuning.

There’s an area in the sewers called the Bottom Waterway but that Carci refers to as the “Organ Trail,” a massive chamber full of waste with heaps of corpses forming walls that turn the murky cavern into a maze. The way through is blocked by G-Adults, enemies new to Resident Evil 2 Remake (replacing the easily evaded spiders from the original) best defeated using Claire’s SMG or Leon’s magnum. Above the Organ Trail is a catwalk where you’ll find a key, and that key leads to a path back up to the Raccoon Police Department (RPD) where those weapons are found. Carci’s route dictates he grab the key and then turn around to go down corridors where he unlocks doors leading up to the police station, leaving the Organ Trail for later. If he goes on autopilot by retrieving the key and then descending into the corpse maze before acquiring his new weapon, the G-Adults could make quick work of him.

“That has happened in practice. Before that, it had never happened in over 100 playthroughs of Resident Evil 2 Remake. If that happens while I’m on stage at AGDQ, that's gonna damage my credibility. This is my shot to actually get a no damage run of Resident Evil 2 Remake at a GDQ event. I really, really do not want to throw this away.”

Fortunately, MattDaRoc will be beaming in remotely, rather than sitting on Carci’s couch of fellow RE players, to make sure he stays on course. “He won’t let me mess up. He can say things to help me keep my head in the game.”

Then there are the lickers, four-legged nightmares that hunt by sound and scent. That means you either kill them or inch around them. If they hear you running, or if you bump into them, they’ll screech and slice you with a jumping slash. On Hardcore difficulty, their leaping attack takes your health status from Fine to Danger. If you’re attempting a no damage run, any hit might as well be a game over.

Dealing with lickers as Claire is easier than with Leon. “You can mix acid rounds pretty plentifully. The damage over time from acid rounds allows you to kill lickers pretty quickly.” Leon’s best weapons, the shotgun and magnum, rely on critical shots for maximum efficacy. “If you try to take a licker head on, there's not going to be enough stopping power with the shotgun to kill the licker before it gets a bunch of hits on you. It's better to creep around lickers until you have a fully upgraded Magnum. I kill a couple of lickers with Leon in the laboratory because it makes going through the downstairs area a lot quicker.”

After making one pass through the RPD, Leon and Claire enter a parking garage. Their path through it splits at the end, but before then, they have to pass through a dog kennel. In Leon’s story, the kennel is filled with dogs locked in cages. It’s an obvious setup: The dogs will break free later. No problem—just use Leon’s handgun to pick them off while they’re penned in. When Claire enters the kennel, she finds a pair of lickers. “If you go into the room and try to run through it, the lickers home in on your position and hit you immediately.”

Carci has sunk hundreds of hours into Resident Evil 2 Remake. Not even he can deal with lickers with 100 percent consistency. That’s why he always has a Plan B. “In that kennel, if you aggro the lickers, you exit and you reenter.” Simple enough, but not without consequences. The game will reposition the lickers near the choke point you need to pass through on the far side of the room. “That makes it impossible to walk around both of them because they can actually turn quickly.” During one stream, Carci ran into the kennel without thinking. The lickers’ piercing screech alerted him to his mistake. He turned and ran back the way he’d come—and then a licker leapt into the frame and slashed Claire just as she was shouldering her way through the door. The attack was so sudden that Carci jumped in his chair.

“I think lickers might actually teleport off screen; that could be the reason I got hit. Obviously, I don't want to be running in that room. I cannot make that mistake at GDQ.”

(Teleporting is one possibility. Another, one I witnessed myself while attempting to navigate Carci’s route, is more terrifying. I made the same mistake and woke up the lickers. I turned the camera to watch them as I ran away, curious how they’d close the distance. To my horror, the licker closest to me slithered across the bloody floor like a snake shot from a cannon. I made it through the door—lickers can’t follow you from room to room—but the sight of that licker slithering at me faster than my character could run is burned into my brain.)

William Birkin, the creator of the G-Virus wreaking havoc on Raccoon City, doubles as a recurring boss. The victim of his own creation, he grows larger and more grotesque every time you encounter him. You’ll face him three times with Leon and Claire (known as G1 through G3), and a fourth time with Claire. While their strategies differ, Carci’s goal with either character is to dispatch Birkin quickly while also baiting out specific behavior that he can prepare for and counter. G3 personifies why Carci hoped Claire would emerge the winner of the bidding war. Her weapons are more versatile, giving her multiple ways of sending him packing. “If you have 30 acid rounds, you can stun-loop G3 repeatedly. As long as you're not goofing off, he's easy,” he says, explaining a strategy he and MattDaRoc put together.

RE2’s heroine can get away with smacking any part of his body with acid rounds until he drops, but Leon isn’t so lucky. “With Leon’s weapons, you use the magnum on his eyes, and then use the flamethrower to shut him down” when the cluster of eyes is exposed. “That’s the only time that you can safely use the flamethrower on G3.”

If Carci chooses the popping-the-eyes route, his safest bet is to shoot them in a specific order. The fight begins with G3 flexing and roaring like a professional wrestler. Carci’s rushes at him, blasts the eye on his left leg with Leon’s magnum, then circles around him as G3 reels in pain to hit the eye on his back. “The next phase is where things get completely random with Leon. You can’t stun G3 the way Claire can; you must anticipate moves. Bear in mind, these attacks happen at specific ranges, usually mid-range. He’ll either stalk toward you, jump toward you, or use what we call the four-piece combo” where he swings his massive, clawed arms in a pattern. “He cycles between these things.”

The problem, he continues, is “I haven't really figured out what triggers him to jump versus stalking.” A few times during practice streams, Carci expected G3 to do one thing only for him to do another and land a hit. That kicked off a lab session. His goal was to perform various actions until he could reliably bait G3 into doing a specific move. He found that going through his opening salvo of blasting the leg and back eyes and then running across the room, where he takes shelter behind a large piece of equipment, was the safest place to see whether G3 would jump or stalk. “If he jumps, I can move forward and right, and he goes right over me, at which point I turn around and I shoot the eye in his leg from behind him, and then I can expect his next move and shoot his shoulder eye.”

Based on G3’s action, Carci could destroy the remaining eyes and force the eye cluster to pop out. That’s when he whips out Leon’s flamethrower and roasts G3 until the boss regains his feet and enters the fight’s next phase. “The level of execution you need to beat him as Leon is a lot more precise than as Claire, whose strategy is consistent.” There’s another issue, one that crops up in every area of the game. Claire and Leon move with fairly realistic weight. That means changing direction forces their bodies to swing left or right. Take a turn too close to a wall, and you could get hung up on the geometry. “If you have to dodge, you have to be 100 percent sure. Like, if I have the camera this way, this is 100 percent where Leon is going to go, and I'm not going to collide with anything.”

Mr. X is a different beast, literally and strategically. There are written and video guides breaking down how he hunts you through the RPD and what scripted events cause him to teleport close to your location. You encounter him a few times with each character, and as you’d expect, Carci has methods to throw him off his scent for Claire and for Leon.

He appears for the first time after you extinguish burning helicopter on the RPD’s second floor. You head back inside to traverse that corridor, only for a gigantic monster wearing a hat and trench coat straight out of a film noir to stalk toward you. It’s natural to flee in panic the first time this happens. There is, however, a consistent way to lure him to you and then lose him. “This is the opening move for both characters. I lure Mr. X onto the roof” where you extinguished the fire, “so I have a nice, wide space to run around him.” As Mr. X’s footsteps grow louder, wait until he opens the door and ducks under the head jamb. He has to slow down at this point. From there, you can either sidle past him through the doorway, forcing him to turn around and duck back through the portal, or do as Carci does and bring him out to the roof where you have plenty of room to circle around him and go through the door.

There’s another scenario. Flee back to the roof too quickly, and Mr. X seems to forget that he just saw you and that there was only one way you could have gone. Should that happen, he’ll stomp deeper into the RPD. This is the last thing Carci wants. The best way to handle Mr. X, who can only be stunned but not killed, making any attack a waste of ammo, is to have a good idea of where he is at all times. Carci and MattDaRoc have a consistent way to bring him outside. “If I grab the handgun bullets on the bench on the roof immediately after I trigger Mr. X's appearance, his AI calculates your last known position as around those handgun bullets. If you're looking directly at the door when Mr. X opens it, you can slip right behind him and go through the door.”

Claire and Leon’s way forward branches from there. The optimal route for Leon is to head outside through another door, go through a bullpen that leads to the main hall, and walk through the west hallway—emphasis on walk, since a licker patrols the area. Claire can run into an office just off the main hall at which point she’ll have to slow down to circumvent another licker. Their shared goal is to take their key (Heart for Claire, Club for Leon) and get into the Records Room where they’ll find a jack handle needed to move a shelf in the library. Picking up the jack usually causes Mr. X to teleport to just outside your location. Carci waits for him to lumber in, then moves in a horseshoe pattern around a shelf in the middle of the room and escapes through the same door he entered. This is where Leon and Claire get back on track. They must go to the library on the second floor, use the jack on a bookcase, heave that case to one side, and proceed to their next objective.

Unless you’re Carci, who's recently come up with a more exciting route for Claire. Instead of running into the main hall and taking the stairs to the library, you continue down the west hallway, up the stairs near the dark room, through the locker room and shower area, and into the hallway outside the S.T.A.R.S. office. You won’t run into Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, but you will find an armory that holds an SMG for Claire or a magnum for Leon. This is the area Carci would usually visit after plucking the key from the pathway over the Organ Trail, and he does so with Leon. But with Claire, he’s found it easier to unlock the cage much earlier in the run, and then leave the office and continue down the hallway to the library, where he was headed anyway. It’s smart, it’s exciting, and it’s dangerous, because Mr. X is hunting you the entire time.

Retrieve the SMG and then listen at the office door to get a bead on Mr. X’s footsteps. He’s practically guaranteed to stomp down the hallway near the office, but there are certain rooms he’s unable to enter; S.T.A.R.S. HQ is one of them. Carci wants Mr. X to backtrack through the shower room and locker area, taking him downstairs. That leaves him free to hang a left out of the office and proceed to the library, where he can place the jack and move the shelf with no fear that X is gonna give it to him.

The rubber met the road during a practice session—and skidded right into a ditch. Perhaps anxious or impatient, Carci left the S.T.A.R.S. office before confirming that Mr. X was headed away from the library. When he burst out of the room, Mr. X was coming right for him. With no time or space to duck back into the office, Carci ran for the library. He hoped to place the jack and move the shelf before X could catch up, but that didn’t happen. Mr. X walloped Claire and ended Carci’s no-damage attempt. “I think Claire and Leon both have the same shelf-push animation, but the animation has extra startup time and slowdown after moving the shelf that just seems comically unnecessary. But of course, this comically unnecessary animation allows Mr. X time to catch up to you and push your shit in. The library is great for luring Mr. X around, but when he's got that straight line from a door directly to you, and you're caught in a horrendously long animation, there's nothing you can do about that.”

He has a plan to prevent this. There are three defensive weapons in Resident Evil 2 Remake: knives, explosive grenades, and flash grenades. The knife is critical for the G1 fight thanks to an exploit that only works on the PC version. Grenades are another story: Leon needs every flash and explosive grenade he can find. Claire needs explosive grenades for Carci’s strategy against her final boss, but she can use flash grenades more freely. “Because I got the submachine gun, what happens is Mr. X can catch up and go into that hallway. I think what I might end up doing is I will have a flashbang, so I will wait until I can hear Mr. X go back through the locker rooms. That’s a fairly comfortable distance away. Then I can go through the unicorn puzzle room and into the library.”

And there’s always concern that the combination of weighty character movement and geometry could help Mr. X catch up and end the run. “He doesn't actually stress me out unless he's really close and there's no way to shake him. If, say, I didn’t know what the collision box was on an object, and then I got caught for a split second on a chair in the library or something, or I ran into a zombie—those are the kinds of things I worry about.”

By the time he finished his practice runs, Carci had reliably finished Claire and Leon’s campaign flawlessly. As he traveled to Pittsburgh ahead of AGDQ 2024’s January 14^th start date, worries nagged at him. Leon had more variables to juggle, even though Carci was confident in his routing. Then there was the possibility his run would end because he got reckless, or anxious, or went on autopilot and missed a step in his route.

“I have to make sure that my movement is good," he says. "I have to make sure that my G3 fight and my Super Tyrant”—a souped-up version of Mr. X unique to Leon’s playthrough—“is good. Those are the main things I'm worried about. The rest of the route is pretty cut and dry. If Leon gets chosen, the run will be riskier. If Claire gets chosen, it’ll be a fun technical showcase. I feel like that's gonna be a really, really cool route to show off. Whatever happens, happens."