Games Done Quick 2022’s Metroid-Heavy Final Night Is Gonna Rule

For the past week, Games Done Quick has held its annual speedrunning festival. As always, the event has been awesome, full of some truly mind-blowing feats, including an exploit-packed run through Halo Infinite’s open-world-ish campaign. But organizers appear to have saved the best for last, with a truly stacked lineup slated for tomorrow, the event’s final night.

Games Done Quick, now in its twelfth year, is a semi-annual event (happens once in the winter, once in the summer) wherein some of the world’s best speedrunners live-stream blisteringly fast, often creative runs through popular games. The festival also fields donations for charity; this year’s go to Doctors Without Borders, an international humanitarian organization.

All of this year’s completed runs are archived on Games Done Quick’s YouTube channel. Some of the most promising runs are still in the pipeline, though. Here’s the full schedule for the weekend (with times that automatically adjust to your local time zone). Some runs to watch out for:

• Linkus7 will blast through every dungeon in the Wii version of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which some (hi) say is the “best Zelda game,” in less than three hours.
• The Metroid speedrunner kekumanshoyu will complete Metroid Dread, the latest game in the series, in an hour and 21 minutes. (For those interested, here’s a rundown of how Dread speedrunners clear the game in less than 90 minutes.)

• Also in Metroid world, Oatsngoats will do a two-and-a-half-hour “any%” of Kaizo Super Metroid, an altered version of Super Metroid that turns the 1994 classic into what can only be described as “fffffuuuuuuccccckkkk this.”
• Shredberg will complete all of the difficult dark levels in Super Meat Boy, the infamously tough side-scrolling platformer, in just over an hour.
• But perhaps the top of the marquee is a Super Mario Maker 2 relay race from PangaeaPanga, juzcook, CarlSagan42, Aurateur, Shoujo, and TanukiDan. These are always a blast.

That’s not all. As a finale, on Sunday, Games Done Quick will wrap up with a pair of Elden Ring runs: Catalystz will earn all “remembrances,” or consumable items from high-level bosses, within two hours; that’s followed by a 33-minute traditional any% speedrun from Hyp3rsomniac. It’s gonna rule. You can watch the event via Games Done Quick’s main website or its Twitch channel.