Summer Games Done Quick, for the uninitiated, is a speedrunning marathon held in the first week of July. It’s in its fifth year now and sees gamers from all walks of life pile into Minnesota to show off their mastery in a large range of different games.
It’s all to benefit Doctors Without Borders, a worthy cause that everyone should get behind.
Unfortunately, it was discovered by observant viewers that the stopwatch being used for every run at SGDQ this year was inaccurate. It was running slow, resulting in a difference of about a second every minute. Now that might not sound like much, but when gamers flex their knowledge to milk every millisecond out of their runs, it certainly adds up during runs that might last an hour or more.
A runner for Ape Escape set a world record during his “all monkeys” run, to the surprise of many.
It was a long while after before the error was caught and exceptional runs began getting re-timed for accuracy. The run suddenly slumped to mid-to-high 1:29 (hour and minutes), leaving the world record that sits in the 1:28 range intact.
We encountered a timing issue with our #SGDQ2017 runs. We have identified the problem and it is now fixed for future runs. Enjoy the stream!
— Games Done Quick ? #FrostFatales 2024 (@GamesDoneQuick) July 3, 2017
The error has been attributed to not only the use of highly inaccurate PC clocks but the lack of use of any software to adjust for the drift caused by using such clocks.
Fortunately, the error was caught and, as of Super Monkey Ball, all of the times being run are accurate and legitimate.
