General GDQ Musings

Some general musings on GDQs, inspired in part by a Reddit post I found particularly amusing.

Sam Viviano, Art Director for Mad Magazine, once remarked that the magazine was at its best “whenever you first started reading it.” I thought about this when reading this thread, because I feel like something very similar applies to GDQs–the best GDQs were the ones you first watched. I don’t really think they’ve changed all that much for about 4 years now, and it amused me that this particular thread included AGDQ2013 and both 2014 marathons. The 2014 ones I found funny because that was when the “They killed all the HYPE from last year, there’s NO FUN ALLOWED anymore!” criticism cycle you see every GDQ really started to reach a fever pitch.

AGDQ2013 was a different story. I personally regard this as what I call “The Identity Crisis GDQ”. This is because, while I don’t think the events have changed that much from 2014 on, they’ve definitely grown and become more professional since their inception (Classic Games Done Quick was literally held in Mike Uyama’s basement, though not entirely by choice). AGDQ2013 was the last one held in the 4H Center, and everyone involved probably tried a little too hard to try and keep what they could of the “Gamers In A Basement” feeling, even though it was no longer feasible at that point. Indeed, it was big enough that SMK, then a member of what passed for GDQ Staff at the time, had to rig together a donation tracker after we broke the system we were using (Something called “ChipIn”, the URL for which now appears to be taken over by some kind of cryptocurrency business) from the sheer volume of donations we were taking in. (Side note: In hindsight, it’s amazing ChipIn served GDQ as well as it did for as long as it did, despite everything going pear-shaped at AGDQ2013. I vaguely remember, but can’t confirm, hearing secondhand that ChipIn staff told someone after AGDQ 2012 [Which did about 30% of AGDQ2013 absolute dollars-wise] “Hey, ChipIn was never designed for something of your scale…”.) Beginning with AGDQ2014, everyone involved with running the event really embraced that it had become something “professional”, for lack of a better term. And while there was a spontaneous element of “anything can happen” to early GDQs that I loved and miss, as a whole, I definitely prefer the “modern” GDQs.

The “core” of GDQs are the same, but for the most recent edition, they took a number of risks, primarily moving the Twitch chat to sub-only and not having Super Metroid as one of the games for what I think is the first time in GDQ history (Including JRDQ and HRDQ). While some will point to the total raised this year (It either barely beat or barely didn’t beat AGDQ2017 based on what’s counted in each) as evidence that these were spectacular failures and The End of GDQ Is Nigh, I think these were actually successes. The crazy year-on-year growth had to stop sometime (And actually already did once–AGDQ2016 raised about 20% less than the previous year, and it’s a bit of a miracle it even did that well, given the absolute chaos leading up to the event), and the fact that two relatively big changes didn’t cause donations to crater is a good thing in my eyes.

When I attended GDQs regularly, one of my concerns as each year brought in seemingly triple the money of the previous year was that eventually a point would be reached where people would say “Oh no, we failed, we *only* raised a million dollars this year!” A million dollars is still a crazy amount of money (CGDQ’s starting goal, in contrast, was five thousand dollars, and people thought that was overly optimistic at the time!), but the fact that 2 million seems to be the baseline now is even better.

-EE