Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ), a bi-annual charity livestream, kicked off this week with an assortment of speedrunners playing new and old games, from Jet Set Radio to Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. A wacky event that tends to attract all sorts of characters, someone made a surprise appearance during AGDQ on January 5: Pac-Man, who played Pac-Man World 2.
Well, it wasn’t really Pac-Man. The day started with speedruns of games like Final Fantasy X, Mega Man Battle Network, Nuclear Throne, and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. As the multi-hour livestream went on, the event’s organizers booted up Pac-Man World 2 for Minecraft content creator DThaiPome to play. If the event raised $10,000, then Pac-Man–really, DThaiPome in a blow-up Pac-Man costume–would speedrun his own game. That fundraising goal was easily crushed, and DThaiPome, in a Pac-Man outfit, played some Pac-Man.
Playing a remastered version of the classic 2002 platformer, DThaiPome managed to beat Pac-Man World 2 in approximately 30 minutes, employing all kinds of skips and tricks to get to the end as quickly as possible.
AGDQ started on Monday, January 4 and runs until Sunday, January 11. And the event is stacked with gaming speedruns, including Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Borderlands 2, Claire Obscur: Expedition 33, Mario Kart World, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Pokemon Legends: A-Z, Silent Hill f, Sonic Adventure, and more. Typically benefitting an assortment of charities, the proceeds of this week’s event go to The Prevent Cancer Foundation, a US-based nonprofit organization aiming to empower people to get ahead of cancer diagnoses through prevention and early detection.