The fact that gamers are incredibly generous when motivated in the right way should not be doubted. This year, the Awesome Games Done Quick charity speedrun event raised over $2.2 million (RM9.9 million) for the Prevent Cancer Foundation; which is $1 million (RM4.5 million) more than it managed last year.
Speedrunning is idea of finishing a game in as short a time as possible. This involves exploiting as many bugs and errors as humanely possible; and also knowing precisely what to do to finish the game. This time around, the players involved held a weeklong marathon session to finish as many games as they could to raise the funds.
Among the more impressive runs were Pokemon Emerald (completed in under three hours) and Undertale (which finish in under 1.5 hours and just 90 seconds short of the world record). Other games were a little more ambitious, with the players attempting to speedrun through Borderlands 2, Doom, and Hitman.
All of the runs were streamed live over Twitch, and the replays have been uploaded to Youtube.
Awesome Games Done Quick has been an annual event since 2011, where it first raised $52,000 (RM232,000). The charity drive first cracked the $1 million mark back in 2014, and hasn’t looked back since.
This isn’t the only gaming based charity to exist on the internet. Child’s Play auctions gaming memorabilia provided by developers to buy games and toys for hospitals to use to entertain young patients. This is also supported by the Desert Bus for Hope, where a group of gamers try to drive a virtual bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time.
[Source: Polygon]
