Heartwarming / Games Done Quick

• The very concept of GDQ itself. A bunch of nerds get together and play video games in order to raise money for charity. The atmosphere is generally upbeat, even when things don't go to plan in a run. People frequently donate in honor of people they know who suffered from cancer in the hopes that others won't have to suffer too. Across the many events they have raised millions of dollars to support those in medical need around the world. Who says video games can't be a force for good?
• After completing his awesome run of Mischief Makers in the 2015 marathon, Jackafur gave heartfelt thanks to his supportive friends for helping him with a difficult previous year and capped it by proposing to his girlfriend live on camera. She said yes.
• The group hug at the end of SGDQ 2015's run of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. For context, the run had a lot go wrong with the game crashing twice and the run going sixteen minutes over estimate. Despite this, the runner Henneko kept positive throughout the whole run and many of the donations were made in support of him.
• During SGDQ 2015's Luigi's Mansion run, it was mentioned that one of the runners, Veman, normally wouldn't have made it, but his mom (affectionately called Ve-Mom) just decided to drive Veman to the event for 10 straight hours, completely unplanned. Said mom appeared on camera after the run to the applause and cheers of the audience.
• During Noir's Half-Life 2 speedrun, there was a donation towards hitting his friend on the couch with the pillow he was sitting on. After doing so, much later, there was a donation on payback, with his friend hitting Noir. Instead, when he was about to smack Noir with the pillow, he dropped it and hugged him, warming all of the crowd's hearts. He still smacked him with the pillow afterwards.
• The runner for the SGDQ 2016 Super Mario World Low % run, Rezephos, had his grandmother on the couch.
• As schadenfreude as it was, Bonesaw577 gaining Sands-Of-Time-at-SGDQ-2015 levels emotional support during his hindered and mistake-laden run of Jak And Daxter during SGDQ 2016 was definitely this. Bonesaw's Heroic Second Wind when the $400,000 donation mark was met during the leg-end of the Precursor Robot fight certainly made it all the better for everyone involved.
• At the end of Pokemon Blue, in recognition of Gunnermaniac's Oddish beating Blue's Venasaur, Keizaron stopped just one button press short of getting in third place so that he and Gunnermaniac could tie for third together. He waited at least five minutes for this event, and then, for even better heartwarming points, swapped controllers with Gunnermaniac so they could press each other's controllers. They even shared a brohug!
• During the Super Metroid race at SGDQ 2016, when Behemoth87 was the only player remaining and fighting Mother Brain, the Twitch chat banded together in an unprecedented show of support and, taking a page from Dragon Ball Z, offered up their energy.
• Despite (or possibly due to) being banned from running in 2017, and spending the week in Japan instead, Bonesaw577 won a character name poll for the AGDQ Shovel Knight run by a landslide.
• All memes aside, it's quite heartwarming in a way that Robbie Rotten won the character name incentive for Dark Souls 3 at AGDQ 2017. After all, they were raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, and Robbie's actor was fighting his own battle with cancer at the time.
  • Bubbles Del Fuego ending the run by telling everyone how, when he was recovering from Hodgkin's Lymphoma, watching the first Dark Souls 1 run at AGDQ 2013 inspired him to take up speedrunning and that he hoped his DS3 run had done the same for a fellow cancer survivor drew a huge round of applause and more than a few tears.
• For the 2017 AGDQ run of Undertale, TGH gives a shout-out to his friend Kaizen, who didn't make it to the event because he was getting preventive treatment for a pre-cancer ailment. The audience then broke into applause when Kaizen then shot off a donation message, and began chanting his name.
  • The bidding war to "comfort" or "shun" Undertale's final boss was an absolute landslide in favour of comforting them. When the moment came up, the entire room began chanting "HUG THE GOAT! HUG THE GOAT!", and broke into applause when the option was selected. Even better? They met the donation incentive to fight the No Mercy final boss, leading to a second bidding war deciding whether to kill or spare that boss. They spared him, and let him sleep as AGDQ 2017 came to a close.
    • The crowd repeated their "HUG THE GOAT"/applause combo at SGDQ 2018, much to the Twitch chat's amusement.
• At the end of the legendary SGDQ 2016 Pepsiman run, runner theboyks tells the audience and viewers to go on Twitter and tell the actor from the live-action cutscenes how much they love the game and how much they liked him in the cutscenes, because theboyks actually knows him and says that he's one of the nicest men that he's ever met.
• Setting up an entire marathon in 24 hours for the Houston Food Bank, titled Harvey Relief Done Quick.
• All the donation comments for Star Fox 2 during its AGDQ 2018 run, as the Star Fox and GDQ community celebrate the debut for a game that nearly ended up becoming Vapor Ware, with the runner and donation comments making liberal references to the fact many fans were desperately playing prototypes to get their fix.
• During the SGDQ 2018 Super Mario Bros. 3 race between MitchFlowerPower and GrandPooBear, Mitch's NES crashes while both are at the very start of World 4. Poo decides to stop on the spot and let Mitch redo everything to get back up to where he was. Even more heartwarming, the route Mitch takes to catch back up leaves him down one whistle (their route involved them whistling in Worlds 1, 4 and 7). Mitch and Poo agree to just fight the World 4 airship and pretend the extra whistle never existed.
  • Even more heartwarming, Mitch was all set to win at the very end; Poo didn't have the hammer suit and Mitch was only seconds behind, and the hammer suit Mitch had would rip through Bowser far faster than Poo's fire flower. And then Mitch's console crashes again. Poo apologizes profusely and seriously considers either calling it a draw or calling it in Mitch's favor right there on the spot, and it takes hype from the crowd and Mitch assuring him it's okay to keep going for Poo to go on and take on Bowser. The sportsmanship on both sides shows how heartwarming speedrunning can really be.
• Towards the end of PJ's run of Mohawk and Headphone Jack, during AGDQ 2019's Awful Games Done Quick block, he took a bit of time out to heap sincere praise on the developer of the game, D. Scott Williamson, for what he considered a technical masterpiece. He proceeded to explain that he had been in touch with Williamson and had sent him a DVD of a previous speedrun, asking for a signed copy of the game. The response from Williamson? Amazement, as that was the most amount of praise he had gotten for that game. He not only returned a signed copy of the game to PJ, but also included a beta build of the game, which allowed PJ to learn even more about it.
  • Furthermore, despite it being in the Awful Games Done Quick block, PJ said that Mohawk and Headphone Jack was one of the most stable games he has run, with it being extremely resistant to game breaking glitches. PJ is known for causing Game breaking glitches by being near games, so if a game earns praise from him being so resistant to crashes, its bound to be a compliment!
• Doubles as an Awesome Moment: A Boss Rush donation incentive for the Super Mario Odyssey run at AGDQ 2019 was hovering around $85k, with around a half-hour left before the run was estimated to end. Twitch Chat had the on-the-spot idea to start a $5 Donation Train (as many people in chat as possible donate $5 at around the same time) at the three-hour mark to push for the incentive. When the time came, the train began, and the donation counter kept rising without pause for well over 15 minutes. From the three-hour mark until the donations slowed to a crawl, GDQ raised over $125,000; that amount both cleared the donation incentive and pushed the event's donation total—which was around $1.86 million before the train—past the $2 million mark, to boot.
• During SDGQ 2019, several people donated $500 each (totalling thousands of dollars) to make the runner pet Eevee during the Pokemon Let's Go Eevee! run. The runner complied, much to the audience's (and Eevee's) delight.
• After Edobean's run of Tetris Attack at GDQx 2019, Edo spent a little time explaining why the category was one-handed — she had gotten enough damage in one arm that she thought she wouldn't be able to speedrun games again. The fact that she was on the stage beating her two-handed time from the AGDQ 2016 race is an inspiration to physically disabled gamers with similar conditions.
• No matter how bad TVGBadger's run of Terraria went, and it went spectacularly badly, the staff and crowd was behind him every step of the way. The run suffered from nightmare RNG, bugs, and backups not working properly, among other things, and culminated with the Lunatic Cultist failing to spawn at all, terminating the run. Even this didn't stop the runner's endless optimism and positivity, and not only was the live audience enjoying it but even Twitch chat was fully behind him. What could have been an unsalvageable disaster wound up being one of the best-received runs of the day because of the runner's spectacular charisma and the audience's unanimous support. The donators even voted to rename Squall to 'Badger' in his honor for the nine-hour Final Fantasy VIII run.
  • His energy was so positive that people kept dropping three-figure donations to cheer him on, a brief train of $500 donations even occurring.
• The entire Golden Sun run was a massive crowning moment of heartwarming for the series, featuring a runner and commentators who clearly loved the series for more than just its speedrunning potential. Beyond them all reflecting on how much the series and its developer, Camelot, changed their lives for the better, they took a moment at the end of the run, preceding the start of the glitch exhibition, to pay respects to Hiroshi Kajiyama, the man who did the box art for the entire series, who had unfortunately passed away a few years before. Their dedication to the game, the series around it, and its makers made the speedrun truly come across as a labor of love.
• MissScarletTanager celebrates her fresh WR in Kuon by showing the chat her chinchilla.
• During SB_runs' 120 Shine Sprite run of Super Mario Sunshine, SB gets a game over roughly 45 minutes in after not paying attention to his life count, something that took him completely off-guard. After struggling with what to do now that he had to start over from scratch, donations came pouring in with words of encouragement, with GDQ staff stepping in to offer SB a new category so he could get as many Shine Sprites as he could with the remaining time he had left. Many argued that this ended up for the better since it resulted in many more donations than if the run went as normal.
• JSR's precious Shiba Inu Peanut Butter speedrunning Gyromite at AGDQ 2024 is as adorable as it sounds, and even the timer briefly goes away to show a "Good Boy!" graphic.

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