The best game-breaking speedruns of Summer Games Done Quick 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images / GDC / DotEmu)

If you've read our gaming coverage over the past few years, you may have picked up on our love of speedrunning-the act of mastering and exploiting beloved games to finish them faster. While a ton of video and streaming channels focus on this hobby, we continue to look to the biannual Games Done Quick marathon series for the most entertaining (and even educational) speedruns every year.

This week, Summer Games Done Quick turned 10 years old and celebrated the milestone by raising $2.3 million for Doctors Without Borders-all without leaving the house. The series already has a few years of remote speedrunning tech experience under its belt, so the lack of a physical location had only a mild effect on the marathon's watchability. Thankfully, the whole event was captured for VOD enjoyment on YouTube, so if you'd like to catch up on the fun, we present to you the following embedded options and explanations as to why they're fun to watch.

TASBot breaks Super Mario 64.

Super Mario 64: Speedrun.com continues to list the N64's breakout classic as a fan favorite, so we were excited to see how a preprogrammed run, adjusted on a frame-by-frame basis, could break the game. As an added bit of challenge, the programmers in question focused on a later version of SM64, which meant they couldn't lean on its notorious "backwards long jump" bug for extra speed.

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