The Legend of Zeldais a beloved series for so many reasons. People love the characters and the grand sense of adventure that comes from playing aZeldagame. Some like tobeat guardians with a pot lid. Others like to beat the games as fast as possible and skip past all that boring stuff. Lozoots is one of those people.
Lozoots is a speedrunner, and like many other speedrunners, he plays through Nintendo titles as fast as possible. There are different kinds of speedruns, too. Some require you to play through the whole game as fast as you can, but the kind we’ll be talking about today is any%. In any% runs, the goal is to complete the game with any amount of it actually done, whether that’s beating one boss or just warping from the beginning of the game to the end.
Advanced speedrunners learn how to do just that; skip through an entire game as fast as possible. At that point, things get quite technical. Speedrunners more or less have to learn how a game’s code works and then exploit it. That rule goes double if it’s an older title with loose code.The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Timeis one such game.
Lozoots' world record attempt sees him beatingOcarina of Timein a staggering 9:57, just under 10 minutes. He had set the world record the day before by beating the game in 9:59. The last time we wrote about anOcarina of Timespeedrun, the game wasbeaten in 16:58 by Torje Amundsen. So exactly how did Lozoots manage to beat an over 10-hour long game in under 10 minutes?
The answer isn’t that simple, or easy to explain. It involves the use of two complicated techniques: arbitrary code execution and stale reference manipulation. By using these two glitches in conjunction, Lozoots was able to warp from Kakariko Village to the credits of the game. If you watch the video above of him performing the run, it may look like random movement and pausing, but every input has a specific purpose.
I want to take this time to congratulate Lozoots on his achievement. Speedrunning is a kind of dedication rarely seen in gaming. It’s our hobby taken to a level far beyond the rest and shows what can happen when players dedicate themselves to a game. Here’s to you, Lozoots.
If you’re more into playing the entirety ofOcarina of Time, you can check outour review of it here.If you want to learn more about the tricks that Lozoots used, another glitch hunter named Fig uploaded a lengthy and complex videoyou can watch here.
