The Gold Split Newsletter - Week #19

The Gold Split offers a free, weekly digest of news from the world of speedrunning and beyond.

This Story of the Week is all about the recently released games list for AGDQ 2025 and was featured in this week's issue. The full post includes more news, briefly, as well as this week's top times and a fun fact. Check it out HERE.

Story of the Week

Awesome Games Done Quick needs no introduction. The next annual pinnacle of speedrunning events will take place in Pittsburgh, PA, as well as online from January 5th to January 12th, 2025.

Recently the official committee released the list of accepted games. It’s been distilled from over 2000 individual public submissions down to less than 10%. This ratio is the unfortunate end result of the team still not having figured out how to bend time to their will. A week still only has seven days.

The tl;dr that you get exclusively ahead of the story is: it’s great. Amazing even. Not only does it include many of the most popular speedgames, a lot of diversity and showcases you might never see elsewhere again, but there are also so many cool nuances and themes ready to take you beyond the usual and showcase other kinds of gaming excellence.

While I don’t want to take away from the experience of seeing these live, I do want to point out some of the guaranteed hits as well as things you might be interested in but have never heard of. The list will include some videos, so if you want to preserve the wonder that only seeing something for the first time can give you, just ignore them.

The obvious hits

• Every single music-themed showcase There’s so much entertainment value and creativity on display here. Crazy Taxi with a live backing band, Elden Ring played with an electric saxophone and completed without being hit, New Super Mario Bros Wii controlled by Joy-Cons strapped to the runner’s head and foot while they play the game’s soundtrack on a piano. I’ll simply let those descriptions speak for themselves. I’ll also add showcases of rhythm games Jubeat and CHUNITHM LUMINOUS PLUS here. Do not miss CHUNITHM.

• Awful Games Done Quick At GDQ events, the awful block showcasing games that are a little… rough around the edges has a long tradition and rich history. There’s a seemingly endless pit from which these games are being dragged onto the big stage. All of them will be relatively short, so I do suggest you stick around for the entire block. Who wouldn’t enjoy a nice and relaxing outing in Golf With Your Grandmother or going backwards at uncapped speeds in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing? Once the schedule is released, simply look for these and you’ll find the block.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (No Logic Randomizer) by @zfg Randomizers randomize the location of items, shops, dungeon entrances, and more. They’ve long been a great way to add variety to older games and provide a fresh experience. Settings can change how hard it may potentially be to get to certain items and places, and in this No Logic run by @zfg the difficulty has been set extremely high. You’ll be able to take a glimpse into the mind of a genius who has played this game actively for well over 12 years.
• Fallout: New Vegas (All Romances) by @Tomatoanus @tomatoanus is incredibly good at providing engaging commentary, so this thirty-minute long breeze where he romances all twelve possible NPCs in a really, really broken game will be such a dense showcase of exactly that ability.

The solid choices

Too many! Here’s a few things I’ll personally be looking out for:

• Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze (Any%, Original Mode) by @spikevegeta DKC is one of the games @spikevegeta is most known for. He has been around for as long as GDQ itself, and for good reason.
• Alan Wake 2: Night Springs (All Episodes) by @sweetpeebs
• F-Zero GX (All Tracks, Max Speed) by @Fifa This is about as fast as racing games go. The level of control is impressive, even if you’ve never played the game(s). But if you have, it’s mind-boggling.
• Spyro: Reignited Trilogy (Spyro 1: Any%, NBS) by @toastedkat

• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Tightened Vice) by @EBen Ben is a good friend and prolific runner of Vice City. He’s been with the game for a very long time and watched the run evolve many times. Tightened Vice is a mod that redesigns every mission and adds a lot of custom content to make the game significantly harder. Typical speedrun strategies are removed from the equation, making this a challenge even for veterans like him.
• Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (Legendary Trial), a race between @GTAce, @EpicCrossover, @authorblues and @Skybilz
• Portal 2 (Single Player, No SLA) by @Msushi @Msushi is one of those people that combines intimate knowledge of a specific game and a great ability to bring that knowledge across through commentary. They’ve created in-depth videos for the Portal games for well over four years.

The hidden gems

There are always a few runs that I’d expect to fly under the radar for most people. Don’t sleep on these!

• Fresh Hops (100%) by @frozenflygone I can’t think of a single Kaizo romhack that I didn’t find impressive and interesting. In addition to those attributes, this one also has a really unique theme.

• G-Saviour (Any%) by @pmcTRILOGY I might be wrong, but I believe this is the first Gundam game at the big GDQ stage. @pmcTRILOGY is a strong advocate of the franchise and has tried for many years and it’s great to see it finally happen.

• Rocket League (Workshop Map Speedrun Showcase) by @ThundaSurge Movement is Rocket League is an art form and such a great example for something that’s easy to beat and impossible to master. For a long time the community has created custom maps that are more about traversing and less about scoring goals.

• Super Mario Bros. (Any% STA), a race between @JeremyMKW, @GTAce, @SuperSonic, and @scalpel This is not your run-of-the-mill race. Don’t get me wrong, any close SMB race would already be great, but here all four Marios are combined on a single screen, with a minimap and timing tower. However, this is not a romhack. All contestants play on augmented NES consoles that pass the signals to a computer, which in turn makes the magic happen.
• Online runs from all over the world! Last, but not least: it’s always very wholesome to see people from all over the world come together. And enabling communities and people to participate that would have a difficult time travelling to the US is a great thing. I already mentioned CHUNITHM, which will be one of the online showcases. A few more I wanted to shout out are three speedruns done by people from Japan: Crypt Custodian by @inari, ane-san by @irukan and Castlevania: Dracula X by @Hensachi_60.

Final Thoughts & What's Next

There’s obviously loads of other good content that I have not mentioned. That does not mean anything can be safely skipped or isn’t worth watching. The quality of the whole list is incredibly high across the board, and my top picks are of course subjective and might differ from yours. I encourage you to comb through the full list yourself and mark your own favourites. Or maybe wait until just a bit later today (November 8th), when the first draft of the schedule will be released, enabling you to already start filling your calendar.

The best thing about this stacked list is that it’s not even complete! Up next are the mentioned publication of the first schedule draft today, followed by a second public submission phase between November 15th and November 22nd. This phase is exclusive to games that hadn’t been released yet at the time of the first submission phase. I’m hoping for showcases of the Silent Hill 2 remake as well as The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. The latter was submitted during the first phase and rejected, but I have a hunch that the committee is simply hedging their bets about more submissions of the same game, considering it technically was released after the first submission phase closed.

Thank you for reading! If you're curious about more of this week's news or would even consider subscribing to the newsletter, you'll find the full post over HERE.

Finding new stories to cover can be challenging. I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should be taking a look at, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨