The spotlight will shine on Mr. Bones this July, but not while surrounded by DaGoulian’s undead army — instead, it’ll be an audience cheering on a pair of speedrunners at Summer Games Done Quick.
SGDQ announced its schedule Friday, revealing the lone Saturn game for the weeklong charity drive: Mr. Bones, set to begin 12:55 p.m. EDT Thursday, July 9. And it won’t just be a standard speedrun. It’ll be a race between two people, Shmumbler and Spectral, who each will see who can reach the end of the game first.
Shmumbler told SHIRO! on Bluesky that the two are running a race instead of a standard speedrun because of Mr. Bones’ notorious difficulty.
“The difficulty lends itself well to creating a race where nobody’s ever really out,” Shmumbler said. “And [to be honest], I also just think it’s funny trying to see who’s faster at cranking out jokes or shredding a guitar solo.”
That difficulty will be mitigated somewhat by playing the Japanese version of the game, which was released after the Western versions and was changed to make it easier.
“It’s still VERY easy to die in several levels, though,” Shmumbler said.
“The race idea came from Shmumbler, and I think it’s an excellent submission choice for this game,” Spectral told SHIRO!. “Like he said, it’s very unlikely for a Mr. Bones race to result in a blowout. It also doubles our chances to showcase the game’s more challenging skips/glitches on stream, which is always a plus.”
It’ll be the first time a Saturn game has been at a Games Done Quick event in more than two years. Virtual Hydlide was run January 2024 at Awesome Games Done Quick where a new world record was set. And it’s been four years since the Saturn was at the summer edition of Games Done Quick — in 2022, Nights into Dreams and Bulk Slash appeared at SGDQ.
Mr. Bones itself has appeared at a GDQ before: Lizstar ran it at AGDQ 2021.
Each winter and summer, Games Done Quick raises money for charity by organizing a full slate of players who speedrun video games. The events are streamed live online 24 hours a day for a full week, and all donations go directly to the charity. This July, money will be raised for Doctors Without Borders, an organization that provides food, water and health care around the globe.
Mr. Bones is the brainchild of Ecco the Dolphin creator Ed Annunziata. It was developed exclusively for the Saturn by a pair of Western studios, Zono and Pacific SoftScape, and published by Sega in October 1996 in North America, March 1997 in Europe and June 1997 in Japan. Its genre is difficult to pin down — it features sidescrolling platforming, top-down action and music rhythm levels.
It stars a heroic guitar-playing, deep-voiced skeleton reanimated by the evil DaGoulian, who’s taken control of an army of skeletons to destroy the world. Its controls are notoriously finnicky, contributing to increasing the difficulty of an already tough game.
Mr. Bones’ top speedrunners
Both runners cited Lizstar’s AGDQ 2021 speedrun as inspiration for picking up Mr. Bones.
“I first got interested in Mr. Bones when I saw it on Two Best Friends Play. I loved the wacky story and the weird bone dropping/reconfiguration mechanic,” Shmumbler said. “Then I saw @lizstar.bsky.social‘s AGDQ2021 run, which put it to the top of my ‘to run’ list. Unfortunately, I only just got a copy this January.”
Spectral said Mr. Bones had been at the top of his to-do list for a while after seeing Lizstar’s run, but Shmumbler really motivated him to play it. “I finally decided to start running the game after noticing some recent activity in the leaderboards, with @shmumbler.itch.io beating the years-old [world record],” he said.
Shmumbler is the current world record holder for Mr. Bones on Speedrun.com while Spectral submitted the third-fastest time just a week ago. One caveat: Shmumbler played the game off of a SAROO cartridge, an optical drive emulator that load game levels and videos much faster than original Saturn CD-ROMs.
“Not sure why flash carts are allowed on the console leaderboard (seems like they’d go with emulator runs, but old console WR is done on a Satiator),” Shmumbler said in their submission. “Anyway, here’s a run with my SAROO.”
“I am going to echo first place submission’s comments,” Spectral said in their submission, which was done using an original disc instead of a SAROO. “Either ODE runs should be marked as emulator or IGT should be added to the leaderboard. Current rules favor modded hardware, which defeats the point of separating emu runs.”
Shmumbler said they’ll use original discs for their race at SGDQ this year, though.
“I don’t actually mind ODEs being allowed, especially for games that can be difficult to source,” Shmumbler told SHIRO!. “Accessibility in speedrunning is never bad! I just feel they’re more appropriately compared to emulator runs due to the inherent performance boost.”
Spectral agreed, saying, “We have to be realistic about the fact that all of these consoles will stop working one day. Accessibility is important, more so for consoles like Saturn where availability is already more limited than some others. But leveling the playing field is also important.”
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