GDQ's women-focused Flame Fatales event has concluded, and it's raised a pretty impressive amount of money for a charity that benefits women and girls around the world.
Flame Fatales ran between August 18th and yesterday, concluding with over $118,000 raised for the Malala Fund charity. As you've probably guessed, the charity was founded by Malala Yousafzai and advocates for girls' education globally.
As a press release points out, Flame Fatales saw speedrunning attempts being made across a number of games this year, including classics like Super Mario 64 DS and Chrono Trigger, as well as newer games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Bayonetta 3.
In fact, it was during a Bayonetta 3 speedrun that Flame Fatales reached a new lifetime milestone of $1 million donations. That's a heck of a lot of money given to charity over the years.
Other speedruns during Flame Fatales this year included Jerikandra's "intense" Chrono Trigger Vortex Save Any% final boss attempt, as well as SnowballSMB achieving a new world record in New Game+ for Sonic & Knuckles.
If you're still jonesing for your speedrunning fix, then you'll be pleased to know that AGDQ (that's Awesome Games Done Quick) is just around the corner; next year's AGDQ event runs between January 5th and 12th.
Games Done Quick has generally been a force to be reckoned with when it comes to raising money for charity; this year's Summer Games Done Quick event racked up $2.5 million for Doctors Without Borders, and last year's AGDQ raised $2.6 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
At a time when women, non-binary folks, and those presenting female are struggling to make their voices heard in the gaming industry, it's great to see Flame Fatales raising some serious cash for the Malala Fund.
The jury's out on how much progress the industry is making when it comes to women in gaming, especially when the phenomenally popular Black Myth: Wukong can tell players streaming the game not to include "feminist propaganda" in their streams, whatever that means.
At any rate, stay tuned for more on this, as well as all other things GDQ-related. Here's hoping for a real stunner for January's AGDQ.
