Speedrunner event Games Done Queer kicks off today, raising funds for LGBTQ+ legal aid by lighting Diddy Kong’s butt on fire

Brethren! Cease your prattling and pick up your GameCube controllers. It is time to start playing Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem at an unhealthy velocity, while funding lawyers to uphold the legal rights of LGBTQ+ people in the USA.

Today marks the beginning of Games Done Queer, a new weekend-long streaming event from speedrunning organisation Games Done Quick. It’s raising money for the Lambda Legal and Education Fund, which aims “to achieve full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and everyone living with HIV, through impact litigation, education and public policy work.”

The event runs from today October 31st to Monday November 3rd, and sees canny streamers undertaking creatively accelerated playthroughs of games from all across the ages – Diddy Kong Racing, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Rift Of The Necrodancer, Deltarune, Kiosk, and Halo: Combat Evolved, to name a few. The full schedule is here.

I confess, I don’t watch a lot of speedruns, but I’m fascinated by the ways in which players queer the machinery and build on each other’s strategies – particularly when it comes to horror games, which may punish you more severely for being hasty. I’ve never played Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, but going by scattered internet chatter, it’s a tough candidate for a speedrun. If you’re familiar with the game, this speedrunner breakdown from way back in 2011 may interest, as may this GameFAQ post in which somebody tries to crack the game’s occluded stamina system.

There’s also Steve Messner’s old feature on “tool-assisted” speedrunning from 2016, in which Super Mario 64 is prised apart like a broken pocketwatch and reassembled into some kind of warp drive. Anyway, best of luck to all the Games Done Queer speedrunners this weekend.