YouTuber Raises $340,000 For Charity Playing Donkey Kong 64

Playing video games is often looked at negatively by a number of groups out there, especially when it comes to politics. There's usually someone claiming that games will turn kids into killers or terrorists or something horrible. However, on the flip-side to that there are also stories about gamers using their skills and reach within the community to raise awareness for charities by playing their favorite games. And that's what YouTuber H.BomberGuy did with Donkey Kong 64.

Eurogamer is reporting that Harry "H.BomberGuy" Brewis, a native from the U.K., decided to stream his playthrough of Donkey Kong 64 for over 57 hours. He did so with a lot of help from the original voice of Donkey Kong, and a brief cameo from Doom's John Romero, who popped into the chat stream briefly. There was also support from politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Apparently the reason it gained such notoriety is because of a contention raised by television writer Graham Linehan, the one behind shows like Father Ted. The organization that H.BomberGuy was raising funds for is called Mermaids.

Graham Linehan originally had the funding that the U.K. National Lottery was set to give to Mermaids halted after calls for an investigation were mounted. Apparently the U.K. National Lottery isn't supposed to give funds to politically motivated organizations, and Linehan argued that Mermaids is a politically motivated organization. So the U.K. National Lottery halted the planned £500,000 that was going to go to the Mermaids organization, which was going to be used to grow the network across the U.K., with 45 additional groups.

The investigation began after Linehan rallied a group of mothers and feminists from a group to e-mail the U.K. National Lottery to look into Mermaids as being potentially harmful for youths. They claimed that it could be dangerous to target kids for transitioning with corrective surgery or medicine since it's a life-changing event. Hence the campaign to stop the funding.

Since the funding had been halted due to the review, H.BomberGuy decided to do a stream to compensate for the £500,000 that was held up in limbo by the National Lottery's investigation. He managed to accrue more than half of that in USD with $340,000, which comes out to close to £267,000.

Thanks to the stream going viral on social media, plenty of people joined in to donate to the stream for two reasons: The first was to help Mermaids to make the money that was being withheld during the investigation. The other was to stick it to Linehan, in which #ThanksGraham began lightly trending within some circles.

The stream that H.BomberGuy put on managed to rack up the sort of funding one would have expected from a Games Done Quick event. The YouTuber is no small fish, though. He commands several hundred thousand subscribers, so he came into the event with a healthy backing.

It's interesting that he chose Donkey Kong 64 to help get the stream over, though. I wonder had it been something like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate or a Twitch-favorite like Dark Souls, would the numbers have changed any? Either way, H.BomberGuy's final haul of $340,000 went to Mermaids.