Awesome Games Done Quick 2018 finishes with more than $2.25 million raised for charity

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All the money goes to the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

This year's Awesome Games Done Quick has sadly come to a close. But there's good news: the celebration of speedrunning raised more than $2.25 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, which is a new record and about $40,000 more than last year.

The total stands at $2,263,373 and counting—you can still donate through the event's website. Looking at the breakdown of the figures, the maximum single donation was $108,092.32, which was a self-donation the organisers made using the money raised from subscribers to its Twitch channel. The number of donations this year was up by about 1,000 but there were fewer donors, which means that viewers were donating multiple times over. 

If, like me, you only managed to catch glimpses of the event's live stream then you can peruse all the speed runs at your leisure on this handy YouTube playlist created by the organisers. At the moment, there's only 81 videos in there compared to 181 total runs, so more should appear over the next few days. There's something for everyone in there: I'm currently working my way through this Hollow Knight run.   

As far as I can see, there was only one world record run at the event (and that was an uncontested record), but all the videos are still mighty impressive. What I like about the event most is that the runners (or their friends) describe what's happening on screen, which means you learn a lot of interesting things about the mechanics and glitches of your favourite games.

Summer Games Done Quick, the other big event of the speedrunning calendar, starts on June 24.

Update: I initially wrote that the largest donation was from one person, but it was pointed out that it was actually a combination of funds raised from Twitch subscribers. Thanks to the commenter that clarified.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.