The Awesome Games Done Quick 2018 schedule is up

Awesome Games Done Quick is coming back for 2018, bringing more than 130 hours of speedrunning to the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport Hotel to raise funds for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Registration to attend is closed but the whole thing will be livestreamed on Twitch, and if you're looking for a particular game or runner to watch, the full schedule has now been posted.

The event will begin at 11:30 am ET on January 7 with some pre-show hype, and come to an end in the big finale at 6:02 am (or thereabouts, I'm guessing) on January 14. More than 150 runners are set to take part, working their magic on an incredibly diverse range of games including Skyrim, Yooka-Laylee, Contra, Serious Sam 3, Resident Evil 7, Ori and the Blind Forest, Umihara Kawase, and, let's see... how about Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon. There's a lot going on here.

Speedrunning, for anyone who's not familiar with the term, is simply the art of getting through a game as quickly as possible. There are different types of runs with different restrictions attached, but generally speaking they involve bending (or breaking) the in-game rules in ways the developers never intended. The sprawling RPG Divinity: Original Sin, for instance, can be finished in a little over 20 minutes if you know what you're doing.

It's not the best way to play the game, perhaps, but it makes for a popular spectator sport: Last year's AGDQ event attracted more than 1400 live attendees and four million unique viewers on Twitch, with more than 250,000 watching concurrently at one point, and raised more than $2.2 million.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.