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Awesome Games Done Quick 2025 rocks out to the tune of $2.5+ million for charity

Awesome Games Done Quick 2025's final total slightly surpasses the amount raised by last year's AGDQ and SGDQ events.

Ozzie Mejia

January 11, 2025 11:44 PM

Games Done Quick/Wes 'Fish' Chen

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Games Done Quick made its return to Pittsburg, PA for the second straight year. It was a full seven days of exciting speedruns, as well as some new ideas that helped shake up the formula in some new ways. At the end of an exciting week, Awesome Games Done Quick 2025 finished with a final total of $2,556,500 raised for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

AGDQ 2025's final total slightly surpasses the $2.5 million total raised during both last January's Awesome Games Done Quick event and last July's Summer Games Done Quick. This will add to the $50 million all-time total raised over the history of all Games Done Quick marathon events. The final amount raised factors in direct donations, as well as donations through partners like Fangamer, The Yetee, and Humble Bundle.

As was the case with last year's GDQ events, this year's AGDQ continued to try out some new ideas in the name of freshening up an annual marathon that has operated for more than 15 years. In addition to standard runs, there were several different types of exhibitions on display. If there was a theme to this year's run, it was the joy of music. This year's most memorable runs included a Crazy Taxi run featuring a live band performing the game's soundtrack, an Elden Ring boss rush where gameplay was executed entirely by saxophone, and a Super Mario Bros. Wii run that was performed simultaneously through a Wii Remote and live piano.

Other runs for the week included an all temples run for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, DLC lockout bingo for Elden Ring, the traditional exhibition for Tetris: The Grand Master, the crowd favorite Awful Games Done Quick block, and GDQ debuts for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Silent Hill 2, Shadow Generations, and several others. The marathon wrapped up with a thrilling Super Metroid four-way race, but with the twist of the game running on a map randomizer. The race ended with Eddie beating out second-place Andy by just 0.7 seconds.

Summer Games Done Quick 2025 is set to return on the week of July 6-13 to its familiar stomping grounds in Minneapolis, MN. In the meantime, the women of Games Done Quick will report in remotely for Frost Fatales on the week of March 9-16. Before all of that, however, Black History Month will see the return of Back to Black (formerly known as Unapologetically Black and Fast) from February 6-9. To check out any AGDQ runs you missed, you can visit Games Done Quick on YouTube and the Games Done Quick website.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?