The link to TSS may be somewhat tenuous, but, like Brad and Sonic Retro, Speed Demos Archive are my bros.
Last year SDA held their first marathon, Classic Games Done Quick, a 55-hour session that blasted through 65 golden oldies, including the original Sonic, Knuckles in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles as Tails, and raised $11k for poverty charity CARE. This year they meet in Maryland for Awesome Games Done Quick, a 107-hour bumper session aiming to get through 100 games in that time, this time for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nWUpNdCYDY[/youtube]
Normally I’m not big on marathons, because, well, I kinda like to see games played well. What sets SDA apart from other groups that organise marathons though, is that, without exception, all the players are experts in speedrunning the games they play. This motley crew includes Super Mario Bros. world record holder Andrew Garkidis who will be playing said game blindfolded, a man called Joe Stanski who you can see plastered all over Sonic records portal The Sonic Center’s Sonic 2 time records, and The Speed Gamers‘ Kari Johnson, better known as the girl that speedruns Final Fantasy games without saving. This is a group you don’t want to #### with.
Unfortunately, Sonic isn’t going to be well-represented this time. In fact, it’ll only be Stanski on Sonic 2. But you guys want to see this game destroyed live on camera in less than half an hour anyway, surely? Joining Sonic from the Sega camp are classics like Moonwalker, Earthworm Jim, Rocket Knight Adventures and Streets of Rage 2, as well as not-so-classic but still awesome games like Super Monkey Ball and Bayonetta.
In addition to all this cool gaming, donations of $5 and up will get you into a raffle for small prizes related to that game, and the top donations will decide important, or not so important, aspects of the run like character and weapon choices, character names in RPGs etc. Finally, some games will be races between 2-4 top players, and there’ll be live piano accompaniment for a couple games as well.
Bound to be a fair bit of fun, so if you’re in, check out the schedule, and turn up at the SDA site starting on Thursday at 9PM GMT for a top marathon ending on Tuesday at 8AM.