Collaborative challenges aren’t a brand-new concept for Games Done Quick–the twice-yearly speedrunning charity event–but KingJO444 took things just a little bit further for Awesome Games Done Quick 2026. On January 10 in Pittsburgh, he gathered a group of 70 players together to attempt an absurdly chaotic challenge: Collect 70 stars in Super Mario 64 with 70 different players. Somehow, he and the community were successful, completing the challenge in under two hours.
It wasn’t an easy feat to come up with an estimated time for the run, at all, because of the 70 people who participated–each getting exactly one star before passing off the controller–only between 15-20 had any serious experience running the game. Of the remaining players, some had not played Super Mario 64 since childhood, and others had never played the game at all.
“You never know how much someone’s going to practice, or what’s going to happen on stage,” KingJ told us in a post-run interview. He set the estimated time to complete the run at an hour and 40 minutes, but this was only slightly longer than the current world record.
“I thought that gave enough of a buffer, but also, I kind of underestimated how many people were going to go in for their first time ever playing the game,” KingJ added. “And not only that, but we also had blindfolded runners, which added on top of that.”
That meant a whole lot of training throughout the week leading up to the run. Several of the more experienced runners worked with the newcomers, ensuring they could get the star they were assigned. One was Ad129, who was also very familiar with the game and supported KingJ since early in the planning phase.
“We spent most of the time in the practice room just having a [game] setup, if not multiple setups, and people would come on by and just do their star–either practicing or just verifying that they could do it. It was very awesome to see someone coming in with no experience in the game and we teach them the star,” they added.
And for the most part, things went off without much of a hitch during the run. Some stars were easier than others (a few literally just talked to Toad to get a few freebies) but the pace at which the speedrunners swapped in and out of their positions and kept things moving was extremely impressive. At one point, too many failures on a certain challenge would have meant game over, but KingJ brought several Nintendo 64 consoles as redundancy options in case of an emergency, swapping to another nearly identical save file on another system in order to keep the run moving.
It’ll be at least 18 months before GDQ is ready for a run of this magnitude again, KingJ said, but his next collaborative speedrunning attempt will likely be a bit smaller.
“Maybe not 70 people,” he said with a laugh. “But something like Mario Kart would be a very fun one. Or something along those lines. I want to keep it mainstream, that a lot of people know, so typically Mario is a very basic one that we can do.”
Whatever the future holds, the speedrunning community’s certainly been successful in raising money for good causes. It raised more than $2.4 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation during this year’s AGDQ in Pittsburgh, and Summer Games Done Quick will raise money this July in Minneapolis for Doctors Without Borders.
