Four Tarnished walk into the Lands Between and decide to punch every single boss in the face. That’s the premise, that’s the energy, and that’s exactly what went down at Summer Games Done Quick 2026.
What Is SGDQ?
If you’re not already familiar with Games Done Quick, here’s the quick version: SGDQ is a week-long charity marathon that raises money for Doctors Without Borders through live video game speedruns, streaming nonstop on Twitch and YouTube. This year’s event is/was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Think of it as a convention where the headline act is watching people demolish games at an inhuman pace while chatting routes and strats from a couch. It’s a great time.
Elden Ring has carved out a permanent spot in the GDQ lineup over the past few years, but this time the showcase was something a little different. Instead of one runner blasting through the game at hyperspeed, the community brought four.
The Run
The All Bosses, 4 Players run was a co-op showcase featuring Mitchriz, LilAggy, star0chris and YoJosherino – four of the big names in the Elden Ring scene, each taking on their share of the boss roster in parallel. The estimated time heading in was 3 hours and 25 minutes.
The run went live Thursday,July 10th, around 10pm EDT – and if you know anything about GDQ scheduling, that’s the slot they reserve for stuff people will lose sleep over. They were right.
Who Are These People?
This isn’t a group of strangers who met backstage. All four of these runners are GDQ regulars, and three of them – Mitchriz, YoJosherino, and star0chris – showed up together just months before SGDQ 2026, running Elden Ring Nightreign as a trio at AGDQ 2026 in January. LilAggy, meanwhile, has been a fixture at these events for years, both as a runner and as a couch commentator.
The point is: this is a crew that’s been running FromSoftware games together at GDQ events across multiple years, and knows exactly what the stage demands.
The Tech Stack
The setup here is more interesting than it might first appear. Each of the four runners was playing their own separate single-player instance of Elden Ring – no shared world, no co-op session. What tied them together was a pair of mods.
The first was a custom boss counter built by community tool developer thefifthmatt, which synchronized boss kills across all four games into a single shared tally. Every time one runner put down a boss in their instance, it registered on the counter for the whole group. That’s what made the “all bosses” part actually work across four independent playthroughs running in parallel.
The second was Deathlink – a mod where any single player’s death immediately kills the entire party. Doesn’t matter if it’s a boss, a fall, or a bad decision: one person goes down, everyone goes down. So not only were they racing to split and clear the full boss roster as fast as possible, they were doing it knowing that one mistake from any of the four could reset everyone’s progress. It’s a brutal constraint to put on a live GDQ run, and they chose it anyway.
Why It’s Worth Watching
The appeal here isn’t just the raw speed – it’s the coordination. When four people are routing the entire game simultaneously across four separate instances, you’re watching something fundamentally different from a standard speedrun. One person executing a memorized sequence is impressive. Four people splitting the boss roster, each running their own game in real time, staying in sync, and keeping a 3-hour clock honest while knowing a single slip from any one of them takes everyone down – that’s something else entirely.
Throw in the GDQ atmosphere – live crowd, donation incentives rolling in, “Would You Date This Boss” energy still in the air – and you’ve got a run that works whether you’ve put 500 hours into the Lands Between or never stepped foot there.
The VOD is on the Games Done Quick YouTube channel. If you were asleep at 10pm on a Thursday, now you have no excuse.
One small gripe and this is purely personal: the broadcast leaned a bit heavy on cutting to individual player screens. When multiple boss fights were heating up at the same time, a split-screen view showing all four runners in parallel would have made those moments even more electric. But that’s my personal preference, I guess. Did it bother anyone else?
… and by the way: we are covering various Elden Ring Events on this blog.
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