Wiki Project: Awesome Games Wiki'd Quick 2019

As you all may know, the annual charity speedrunning stream AGDQ (Awesome Games Done Quick) is currently underway. What I usually do before the start of each of these week-long events is ensure that our wiki is all up to date to make it easier on the stream organizers to coordinate their Twitch channel, as Twitch relies on our API for most of its game information. In the past, I've used this as an excuse to talk about some games in the schedule that I was looking forward to seeing run, but this time I want to go over just how much work is usually involved.

Of course, reading that back it sounds like I'm fishing for compliments for all the labor I put into this act of largesse, as if it compares at all to flying out to the middle of nowhere and performing an extremely difficult act of video gaming in front of a crowd of thousands while providing commentary throughout. It's more that I've managed to streamline this process to the point where I've come up with nicknames based on what games usually requires the most wiki love, and I thought it might be neat to frame this year's Wiki Project rundown with that process in mind. Like a glamorous behind-the-scenes sort of affair for what goes on when editing a wiki. "Digging through the dumpsters behind McDonald's" glamorous, at least.

I've sorted the 120+ games showcased in this year's AGDQ into the following seven categories, in ascending order of the amount of work they usually require:

1: The Regulars

Easily the largest and most welcome of the divisions, the Regulars are games which have appeared at GDQ before. There are a lot of games that work well with speedruns, or are popular, or prove to be particularly malleable when it comes to glitches and tricks to exploit, and so they tend to attract a large audience of speedrunners and thus pop up in many GDQ events.

Because these games have appeared in previous GDQ events, it also means they've been in previous GDQ Wiki Projects. I can therefore just leave them be this time around.

Example: Super Metroid. Super Metroid makes the rounds almost every year as part of a recurring donation incentive to "kill" or "save" the friendly animals that teach Samus how to use some of her abilities; the former reducing the speedrun time to potential world record-breaking levels, while the latter is more in the spirit of an anti-cancer charity event. As you might expect, the race between those two is usually very close. (Other examples: any Super Mario, any Mega Man, any Castlevania.)

2: The SNES Games

More of a side-category to the above, really. The SNES is still an incredibly popular console for speedrunners for various reasons, not least of which because it's an incredibly popular console for pretty much everyone else.

The benefit of having completed the wiki pages of the entire SNES library a few years back means I can skip any I see in the schedule, even weird ones like Home Alone 2: Lost in New York or Mohawk & Headphone Jack (both in the Awful Games Done Quick block this year, and rightly so).

3: The Notables

These are all household names, usually having sold millions of copies or otherwise holding major cultural cachet, but for whatever reason don't appear in speedrun events that often. Maybe it's an RPG without any major skips, which means a single run is still many hours long, or maybe it's a portable-only game or an arcade cabinet that would be difficult to stream.

To their benefit, being well-known games means their pages tend to be fairly complete. Wiki editors gravitate to what they know and popular games have a lot of information sources out there to draw from. If I need to do any work with these pages, it's to fix typos and style infractions (like 2nd-person usage) that have probably been there for years. Neither of those are really pressing, so I either skip these pages too or spend a couple minutes cleaning them up depending on how productive I'm feeling.

Example: Final Fantasy IX. Final Fantasy IX's "speedrun" is estimated to be over nine hours long and will take up a significant portion of Saturday's streaming. I don't doubt it'll involve a lot of cutscene skips and low-level boss encounters, but that's still a significant time investment and is almost certainly the reason FF9 doesn't pop up every year. (Other examples: God of War II, Mario Kart DS, Halo: Reach.)

4: The Forgotten

Now we have those games that perhaps were never all that popular, or have long since slipped the minds of the mainstream gaming audience due to a lack of availability or a senescence that makes them challenging to revisit (like a racist grand-uncle). Most games from the 90s and earlier tend to fall into this category, unless they're especially beloved and/or ideal for speedruns.

The page quality of these games vary wildly. Occasionally, we have fervent fans of older, less-remembered games who do a fine job filling out a page with all the info they can muster up. Usually, though, these pages are in a rough state and no-one's come by to check on them for years. As long as there's some text in the deck and release info for the Twitch API scraper to pick up, we're golden.

Example: Mega Turrican. A perfect example of the kind of older game most people would've long forgotten about, if they played it at all. Turrican was a big deal for anyone who owned a home computer in Europe in the late 80s, but even though this Mega Drive/Genesis sequel was meant to help it break into the mainstream, it ended up being a damp squib for both its fans and for console players who wondered why anyone would want a less good Contra: Hard Corps. (Other examples: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Dragon's Lair for Game Boy, Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2.)

5: The Newcomers

Simply put, games that are showing up on a GDQ event for the first time because they're brand new. Speedrunners are naturally drawn to new games because there are no record times for them yet, and plenty of new tricks and exploits for talented scouts to find. Also the obvious reason, which is that most are down to try out some new games they haven't yet seen.

Depending on their fame, their wiki pages can be full or almost completely empty. A lot of Indies qualify for this category too, in particular 2D platformers and action games that are built with speedrunning in mind. Though they rarely escape the notice of that community, they often escape the notice of ours.

Example: Guacamelee! 2. You'd think last year's sequel to Guacamelee, which was an acclaimed spacewhipper, would've seen a bit more of a reception on our wiki. Instead, the page was almost devoid of text. Likewise, the throwback bonus game Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon needed an overview section, as did EA Original Fe and cutesy iOS platformer Cat Bird. It does feel like recent disinterest in the wiki is hurting a lot of 2017-18 games.

6: The Esoterica

The truly forsaken, these are games that simply don't register to anyone, either because of limited release, poor quality, regional exclusivity, or any combination of the above. Unlike the Forgotten, I don't think these games were ever well-known or remembered fondly by anyone. The Awful Games Done Quick block is almost entirely stacked with these tormented specters of gaming past. Sometimes I sit and stare at that block on the schedule and wonder what inspired the runners to pick those games in particular.

If their pages exist at all, they're usually skeletons. They easily eat up the most time I put aside before they're in any kind of decent shape. Hey, I've wasted my time on dumber shit in the past.

Example: Avoid the Noid. Not to be confused with the NES game featuring everyone's favorite corporate pizza mascot, which was called Yo Noid! and was a graphic swap of Famicom game Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru. No, this is the home computer Avoid the Noid game from the 1980s which was a confusing platformer with no direction that took several seconds to load in each screen, and if the ten second music loop didn't induce violent thoughts the Noid's scratchy laughter sure will. It's a miserable trashfire, which is more than the Noid perhaps deserves. (Other examples: Generations Lost, a terrible Flashback rip-off on Genesis; Gordo 106, an Atari Lynx game about a rambunctious monkey; and the Japan-exclusive Famicom game Garfield: A Week of Garfield, which had a week of Garfield in it.)

7: The Forbidden

Finally, we have all those games that are either ROM hacks, mods, weird flash meme games, unlicensed fan remakes, free browser games, or some other fringe type that wouldn't normally qualify for a Giant Bomb wiki page.

As such these games are excluded from any kind of wiki work, though they can still make for entertaining streams. Depends on just how bad the memes are.

Example: Super Mario Bros. 3mix. I heard about this ambitious Super Mario Bros. 3 hack, which includes brand new bosses on top of a huge amount of other content, and was curious to see it appear in the AGDQ stream. It's also a race, so that's fun. No matter how elaborate an unlicensed fan game is, we can't include it on the wiki (so stop sending submissions for Project M and Pokémon Uranium, weiros). I can still admire the craft that goes into these games though. (Other examples: Sanic Ball, Quickie World, Mega Man Unlimited.)