Another six months have passed, another seven days of 127 different video game runs brought to us by Games Done Quick. I took the week off to enjoy the show, and it was a solid good. And now I’m busy trying to catch up with work and get back on my typical routine.
Now where were we again? Right, the event.
Since the pandemic had been receding since this winter, in person gatherings have started to spring back up in full force. And this was one of those events. Yes, for the first time in two and a half years, Games Done Quick abandoned the “Online” era to make a big and epic resurgence to their in-person events that originally put them on the map, and this time they were adopting a new hybrid event format allowing a limited number of runs to be live-streamed from the comfort of the runners’ homes. As someone that loved the aspects of remote runs and the sheer accessibility they provided, especially to those that lived too far from the event to travel there and stay at a hotel, this was a model that I hugely appreciated- and the runner’s audio was combined with the Twitch crowd’s to increase the version like they were really there.
There was of course a caveat to the live crowd’s return. Since the pandemic was still very much ongoing, alongside strict safety procedures being enforced throughout the marathon, the seats were spaced out and only covered half the size it did in previous live events. This led to more moments than usual where there was nothing but dead air in the crowd and its reactions, and a lot of memes of the pre-online era being either not as prevalent as they once were (ORB!) or completely dead (HONK!, though I think that was because Untitled Goose Game was “flavor of the month” material). The decreased number of seats made it much easier to notice when people weren’t piling in to watch the streams live, and on Tuesday morning in particular the crowd camera was positioned in just a way that the feed appeared to show absolutely no one, making it look desolate.
In fact, according to outside sources, this GDQ turned out the lowest peak viewership of any marathon in the past few years, and that's after the pandemic already cut peak viewership in half for SGDQ 2020, meaning donations lagged behind quite a bit and incentives once again struggled to be met, causing the runs before when a bonus run would occur to be showered in hosts begging for people to donate, often to excessive levels. And in spite of that, the incentives to unlock bonus runs were pretty huge for the audience it was able to pull in. It still was able to make $3 Million by the final day, thanks to some last minute pushes, but maybe the incentives to unlock bonus runs should be scaled back a bit until the marathon recovers its viewership?
With how much I sung the praises of this new onsite/online hybrid format, the onsite half clearly took the priority by a wide, wide margin— only roughly 20 of the runs featured were online, while the remaining 100 were on-site. Looking at the submission list that was available before the schedule’s release date, you can see a great deal of run submissions from all over the world, including Europe, and it makes me wonder just how different the event would be if several more remote runners were let into the marathon. Obviously the remote blocks would be bigger and/or more frequent, but the live runs would remain the main focus of the marathon. If expertly timed, these remote blocks could be used to have runs that would fill the pretty dead early morning hours of each day (since Europe is ahead by 6-8 hours and Japan/Australia by several more hours) or have their run time be used to set up for a more ambitious run that otherwise requires a lengthy setup time at the site (probably not going to happen since the rhythm game runs this marathon were remote and I have a feeling that’ll also be the case for AGDQ 2023, but still).
The layout of the stream was another thing that I thought looked a bit… off. While it worked as intended, the game/run infobox which showed the title, the console, and year of release of the current game plus the current category and estimated runtime of the current run stuck out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the layout, flipping between displaying the game info and the run info at a slow pace in fields that seemed too small for the game’s release year and console instead of showing everything at once. Just look at the infobox design for SGDQ2022 and you'll see what I mean:
Compare and contrast AGDQ 2022’s version of the game/run info part of the layout, which blended with the new layout’s aesthetic better, had just the right amount of room and showed everything in one swoop:
The “new” layout previously made an appearance at GDQ’s Frost Fatales event in February, and I didn’t like it there either. If the reasoning for shifting to this design is to make the game info easier to read, taking the AGDQ 2022 design and increasing the overall font size would work, since you rarely come across a game with a title that’s long enough that it needs to be split into multiple rows or a console that uses more than ten characters due to using abbreviations instead of the full names. (And heck, the game info text stayed relatively the same size between the new layout and the "new" layout).
At the end of the day both layouts work fine, though I do wonder what happened in the background after AGDQ 2022 and before Frost Fatales 2022 that made them go through with this "new" game info section after only one marathon. I did hear the layout was still in a WIP state around the time of AGDQ 2022 but I would have thought that the Frost Fatales 2022 variant was only a temporary fix until they could refine the game infobox for SGDQ 2022... Maybe by AGDQ 2023 we'll see a return to the AGDQ 2022 design?
Anyways, enough wasting time about a small box of text, time to talk about those runs. Without talking about the runners themselves the marathon still suck to the “niche games in the early/late mornings, bigger marketable hits in the afternoon/evening” format of recent GDQ’s, which I’ve come to accept as something that would never change. It does make some afternoons feel like a slog when you’re given multi-hour runs of games back to back that have very little in the way of fast-paced energy. Take Monday afternoon’s back-to-back combo of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (2019) and ICO, for example. Two rather slow-paced games that don’t have much in the way of speed and thrill lumped together despite how well the games were played by their respective runners. Compare that to Tuesday’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon; a game that, while much longer, had enough fast action, thrills, and humor to help one endure the 4-hour run. RPG runs usually become the “background audio while I do something else to pass the time” moments during the marathon so it’s nice to see one that breaks the mold, and I heard the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 run was worth a watch but I was too sleep-deprived from the Silly Block to stay focused on it (more info on that later).
The one thing I was the most delighted for when the schedule was initially released earlier this spring was the return of a full, meaty four-run Mega Man block on Tuesday, after spending SGDQ 2021 and AGDQ 2022 as mostly an afterthought. The Sonic block, meanwhile, had one of its runs early on Sunday before the block officially begun on Wednesday, only for Knuckles to steal the show and (save for one run) turn the block into the Knuckles the Echidna block thanks to winning two different character choice bid wars. The Castlevania block, usually a pretty run-rich block in other marathons, only had two games this year, and the horror block of Monday night, Tuesday morning just came and went, but I think that’s from me not being up to see the whole thing.
What I was up to watch was the Silly Block of Thursday morning, which was very much worth it, although I had to tune out of Mi Scusi and Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion cause DEEEER Simulator absolutely floored me, and I nearly feel asleep watching Incredible Crisis after barely sleeping the prior night to catch the entire block live. Heck, I pretty much spent all of Thursday desperate for sleep, which is nothing new for me while watching GDQ events but I would absolutely not recommend warping your sleep schedule just for this, unless you already wake up at 6 in the morning. Then again I appreciate this Silly Block starting at 6 AM instead of… 3AM and having a longer runtime and selection of games overall, since AGDQ 2022’s Awful Block felt way, way too short and had most of it swallowed up by Zelda's Adventure.
Part of the delayed start for the Silly Block can be attributed to the event’s schedule falling behind by a few hours due to setup times so to cut the schedule down so the finale wouldn’t be at 6 AM, the runs for Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon and Superheat VR were canceled. Half Life Alyx was dropped prior to the start of the marathon because the runner caught Covid and Macbat 64 was skipped due to its runner supposedly sleeping through when the run would have taken place. It’s a realistic problem when you put all the games not many people are familiar with and shove them all into the early mornings even if the chance of someone oversleeping is pretty rare. And it’s where those early-morning remote blocks that go through those few hours in the United States I mentioned earlier could, theoretically, be put to effective use, especially for international audiences.
Speaking of remote runs and runs that didn’t count, Metal Gear Rising: Revengence. I’ve always had a big love for this game, especially after the massive resurgence the game received earlier this year, and the first time in a while it got approved to show up in a GDQ, I got pumped and eagerly waited for it to slice onto the GDQ show floor Thursday night. It easily became one of the most fun and exciting runs of the event… and then the bonus Blade Wolf DLC run that followed afterwards was revealed to be pre-recorded and spliced together rather than done live, with no hints that it was a "showcase" run until it happened. It made news on a good few gaming-oriented websites and the run (and I mean all of it, not just the DLC) was axed entirely from Youtube.
I should illiterate that people don't usually come onto these speedrun events/marathons to set records, and nothing in the marathon pushes runners to go and attempt WR's in a marathon setting. Sure, they do happen, but they're so infrequent that the difference in sheer hype between someone finishing a run or even getting a PB to outright claiming a new WR is rather miniscule. AGDQ 2022 set so many because the games that did have new WR's set were either from the games being relatively new with a small number of active runners, or an obscure category.
The entire debacle also puts the concept of remote runs on shaky ground, especially after a similar dilemma occurred the prior weekend during GDQ Hotfix’s Juneteenth event (though for different reasons) and I’d be scared if Games Done Quick considers abandoning the concept of remote runs at AGDQ 2023 or phases them out of future mainline marathons because of these bad eggs and especially after two years and four marathons worth of successful remote runs.
The final two days of the event seemed to just breeze on by, with the highlights being the “Beta Showcase” for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is more accurately a full-on rom hack performed live through tool-assisted arbitrary code execution incorporating a barrage of beta, cut, and rumored content. After that was two Kaizo-level Super Mario World hacks, one of them being a sequel to the 2019 Relay Race that I ripped the OST of earlier this year, and it (along with the Mario Maker relay race the following day) made me realize how much the hype of the relay races of live marathons was huge for the last legs of the marathon.
Overall, Summer Games Done Quick 2022 was a solid marathon, even if it didn’t come close to breaking the $3.4 million record. While I thought AGDQ 2022 had something of a stronger game lineup, it was nice to see another new marathon in the books after so long and a live one at that. Now I wonder if they’ll bring back Games Done Quick Express one of these years since TwitchCon is underway again…?
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