Giant Bomb Presents: Meet the Man Behind Games Done Quick

SGDQ Hype! Love the scene and much respect for the time they give up to host it.

This is romscout, right?

http://www.twitch.tv/romscout

In my experience he's usually a lot more upbeat (during runs), but maybe he was just nervous.

Also I'm pretty sure Mike Uyama organizes Awesome Games Done Quick, whereas romscout does Summer Games Done Quick.

SGDQ hype! This is Banjo-Tooie's first appearance at a GDQ! I'm donating 200$ during Tooie! Woo!

@timing: Yeah, I thought it was gonna be Uyama when I saw it on the schedule.

YSG hype!

Its great to get some behind the scenes coverage of GDQ. I don't follow the speed running scene, but these streams have been awesome through the years and deserve their success. Nicely done!

(On the topic of LPers, Endurance Runs, etc, from yesterday's Bombin' the A.M. So no one gets confused by this post.)

As I was trying to squeeze into the small character limit during yesterday's Bombin' the A.M., I think this is an exact example of how playing games alone can count as transformative work, commentary be damned.

Every playthrough is different, a game may tell a tale, but the real story for most games is what the player does, how they interact with the world. If this wasn't the case, speedruns wouldn't be so massively popular. No one is watching a speedrun of Yoshi's Island just because they want to watch Yoshi's Island. For one, that's not "experiencing," Yoshi's Island, and secondly, they're there to see MASTERY. They're there to watch what super high level play looks like.

That's why you can watch speedruns all day, without any commentary whatsoever, and it's a vastly different experience than how you play a game. And how you play a game is vastly different than how your best friend might play. That is transformative work. Adding commentary (personality) on top of that just sweetens the deal. A game is not a movie, simply seeing it is not experiencing it. Just like listening to a movie is not the same as watching a movie; that's missing a critical dimension of the experience. A game in terms of an Endurance Run or a Let's Play is like a stage, and the performance, the reason we watch, is the person playing, what they do, how well they do.

There may be an element of interest in the game itself, of course, variety, something to work off of, something new to see, but that's to be expected. It is not the main draw, it simply adds to the appeal. For a somewhat flawed but I think decent enough comparison, you wouldn't pay royalties to Blue microphones just because you use their product, Patrick. Your voice would be nonexistent without some sort of microphone. Your face, vanished without some sort of camera. Those things are critical, absolutely CRITICAL to your content. But they are simply props and tools, we don't come to see your mic, though we appreciate its quality. We don't come to love your camera, though we appreciate it showing us your crazy hair. We're there to see Patrick and hear Patrick.

The same applies to Let's Plays and Endurance Runs, I think.

Rom did a really good job explaining what it's all about. Great interview.

Patrick: I'm a videogamer. I have played Symphony of the Night!

Nice to see them getting some attention from the staff.

The Giant Bomb members have banded together with some big donations in the past.

YAAAAYYYY Romscout!

Getting HYPE!

Same here,I was expecting Uyama.

Been watching these marathons for a couple of years now, always amazed by the mastery of these games. This also lead me to watch Cosmo and Trihex a lot when they're streaming, actually managed to catch Cosmo's last 2 WR's on Ocarina of Time (or maybe PB, I don't remember.

Happy to see Patrick highlighting this great cause ahead of time, the GB community did a marvelous job in January with the RyanD donations.

It was mentioned a bit in the interview, but if you want to see Romscout's current World Record Speedruns of Alucard mode in SOTN, check them out:

Alucard Any% (No Corruption)

Alucard All Bosses

He also has the current WR in at least one of the categories for each of the DS Castlevania games and runs pretty much the entire Castlevania series here and there as well as SMT, Kirby, and Mega Man games.

With his choice of image it's clear Patrick will stop at nothing to push his pro yoshi's island agenda!

Awesome interview patrick well done keeping things going during it.

Yep, this is correct. This year Andrew 'romscout' Schroeder took over Summer Games Done Quick, and previous organizer Mike 'mikwuyma' Uyama will continue to organize Awesome Games Done Quick in January.

As an avid speedrun watcher and budding speedrunner himself, I am super psyched for more 'GDQ.

If anyone wants to get hype for SGDQ, you can check out the VODs from AGDQ2014 back in January here. I personally recommend F-Zero GX, Punch-Out (blindfolded!), Super Metroid, and Goldeneye.

If speedrunning sounds like something you want to try, head over to the forums on Speed Demos Archive and look around. There's a casual speedrunning subforum too. It doesn't all have to be about breaking records.

Oh cool I was gonna skip this cause I thought it was gonna be an Ueyama interview. But Romscout is a really cool dude.

I only found out about this event because of Yoshi's Island. Jeff said he hated it but thought it made for good speed runs, which led me to watching it on Youtube and then I found out that the guys speedrunning had been part of this bigger event. It's great to see the amount of skill that it takes to speedrun games.

"NO! I AM A VIDEO-GAMER!"

very nice :D

So is Uyama though :-) This was a fun one!

"I'm a videogamer."

Love it.

Hey, son. Patrick is a video gamer, alright!

"I'm a video-gamer."

This 4-man race on Super Metroid from AGDQ continues to be my favorite speed run ever. There's a decent crowd, super metroid is a really crazy game to watch ONE person barrel through, let alone 4 people and the commentary is informative and exciting.

@renegadedoppelganger: Holy shit that was intense. Glad I stuck through to the end cause goddamn.

LOL!

Also cool interview, love the GDQ events! Friday evening (eastern time) has a pretty cool block but I am going to miss it! I swear next event I'm going to book some time off work. It's nice to watch the archives, but there's nothing like seeing some of those runs go down live.

AGDQ and SGDQ are some of the best things to come out of streaming games online.

Also, I like how the Dumptruck intro music sounds kinda like Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

As someone who hates timed stuff in video games (makes me anxious), I've never been interested in speed runs. But this is a cool thing for those that are.