Speed Runner Beats Ocarina of Time in Less Than 19 Minutes

StewShearerOld

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Jan 5, 2013
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Speed Runner Beats Ocarina of Time in Less Than 19 Minutes


Speed runner Cosmo Wright has beaten The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 18 minutes and 56 seconds.

When I think of my experience with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it's one very much defined by length. Long years waiting for the game to come out and joyous (but still long) months spent playing the game and squeezing every last little bit of entertainment out of my gold cased cartridge. For other players however, it would seem that the name of the game when it comes to Ocarina of Time is speed.

Take speed runner Cosmo Wright, for instance. Back in August 2013, <a href=http://kotaku.com/this-guy-beat-ocarina-of-time-in-less-than-twenty-minut-1189078311>he set a record with his 19 minute and 15 second completion of Ocarina of Time. This record held until last month when it was beaten by <a href=http://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/profiles/skater82297>fellow speed-runner skater82297, who managed to complete the game in 19 minutes flat. Not to be outdone, Cosmo Wright recently came back with footage depicting <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAwJX-9zNBA>a new run where he managed to finish the game in 18 minutes and 56 seconds.

Now, there are some caveats to keep in mind. For one, the version of the game being played here is the Japanese edition which is faster during cutscenes than the English and PAL releases. It's also worth mentioning that this isn't a full completion of the game and that it exploits a glitch that allows the player to skip from the first boss battle to the end of the game. All of that said, this is still an impressive feat of practice and precision that we can only imagine will be pretty danged hard to top. And, of course, that's exactly what Cosmo Wright aims to do. His next goal is to beat the game in 18 minutes and 45 seconds. We'll be eager to see if he's able to do it.

Source: <a href-http://kotaku.com/the-fastest-ocarina-of-time-player-beat-his-own-world-r-1545914453>Kotaku


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Revnak_v1legacy

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Mar 28, 2010
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008Zulu said:
I don't recognize his achievement. Exploiting glitches to beat a game should invalidate the entire effort.
I don't know, I'm pretty certain that all games are based on exploiting whatever mechanics are thrown at you. As long as they didn't alter the game to accomplish what they're doing I don't really see what's wrong with it. And to be honest... the game is a lot more awesome as the story of a kid who rode down a waterfall, caught some chickens, fell down a tree, did a silly dance, and then teleported into the future to kill the greatest evil in the world. Kinda an absurd masterpiece really.
EDIT- I'd also like to add that sonic 06 is a lot better as the story of the time sonic drowned his friend and then listened to some sweet music.
 

Roxas1359

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Aug 8, 2009
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008Zulu said:
I don't recognize his achievement. Exploiting glitches to beat a game should invalidate the entire effort.
Except, you know that's how speedrunners do these things. IT takes a lot of time playing a game to be able to not only find the glitches, but to also execute them perfectly so as to not lose any time. In speed-runs like this, ever millisecond counts.
 

cookyt

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008Zulu said:
I don't recognize his achievement. Exploiting glitches to beat a game should invalidate the entire effort.

That's kind of like saying that we shouldn't recognize the achievements of runners in the 50 meter dash because they exploit the shortness of the distance to sprint without worry for getting tired in the long-run. This style of all-out-sprint of speed running is just another "course" that speed runners can try for. There are other courses like all bosses or no glitches, but each course requires a different strategy, and I'd say it's worth acknowledging each course for the different challenge it poses.
 

Fappy

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That was awesome. I enjoy speedrun videos when I can actually tell what is happening (dat Diablo 1 speedrun is fucked) and I am curious to know how some of these bugs work behind the scenes. Like, why does the game think to send Link to the Ganondorf death scene after glitching out the portal and leaving out the door in the Deku Tree? What is the logical hoop the game is jumping through to get there?
 

008Zulu_v1legacy

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Revnak said:
SirBryghtside said:
Neronium said:
cookyt said:
He is obviously playing the game outside of the intended spirit of it. But maybe you are all right. While we are at it, lets give back the medals to everyone who ever juiced at the Olympics.

Exploiting bugs/glitches is cheating. If he wants to set a legitimate record, have him go through the game properly.
 

Uratoh

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Fappy said:
That was awesome. I enjoy speedrun videos when I can actually tell what is happening (dat Diablo 1 speedrun is fucked) and I am curious to know how some of these bugs work behind the scenes. Like, why does the game think to send Link to the Ganondorf death scene after glitching out the portal and leaving out the door in the Deku Tree? What is the logical hoop the game is jumping through to get there?
My brother explained it to me...basically, each 'door' etc has two things that tell the game where to send you. the door's ID, and its destination target. normally this never really changes unless the game wants you to go in one door to leave an area and come out somewhere else for a cutscene, etc...but basically what he's doing here, is the way the 'boss room leaving light' works is when the camera has been looking into the light (once the light is triggered) for a set period of time, it sets the destination ID to whatever number, and activates the 'door' that is the teleporter, and that 'door' and ID corrospond to 'outside the dungeon'. In this case, he's basically avoiding 'allowing' the light to be seen by the camera (this is a weird way to code an exit, really...) for just long enough that as he goes through the exit door, the camera 'pans' over the light and it sets the destination flag...as he's using a door the game wasn't expecting him to, changing where the door sends him. It just so happens that this door and the destination ID correspond to 'final area of the game'.

That's second hand explanation from someone who doesn't fully understand it, but that's basically what's going on. the light changes the destination ID # and he goes through a door the game wasn't expecting him to, so it sends him somewhere else that happens to be beneficial to his speedrunning.
 

Roxas1359

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Fappy said:
That was awesome. I enjoy speedrun videos when I can actually tell what is happening (dat Diablo 1 speedrun is fucked) and I am curious to know how some of these bugs work behind the scenes. Like, why does the game think to send Link to the Ganondorf death scene after glitching out the portal and leaving out the door in the Deku Tree? What is the logical hoop the game is jumping through to get there?
Programming wise the main thing I know is that the Master Sword's power is actually the same a a Deku Stick in the game. That's right, the programming of Ocarina of Time has the Sword of Evil's Bane be equal to that of a wooden stick. XD
For why it sends you there, it has something to do with a loading error I believe.
 

Revnak_v1legacy

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008Zulu said:
Revnak said:
SirBryghtside said:
Neronium said:
cookyt said:
He is obviously playing the game outside of the intended spirit of it. But maybe you are all right. While we are at it, lets give back the medals to everyone who ever juiced at the Olympics.

Exploiting bugs/glitches is cheating. If he wants to set a legitimate record, have him go through the game properly.
Wearing clothes while playing sports is cheating, real athletes play naked. And they play without talking or thinking too creatively.

All the things that they do are within the rules of the game, the program of the game. They aren't cheating in any way, just like it isn't cheating to run the 100 meter dash forwards rather than backwards. Sure, that seems like a bad analogy at first, but that's only because you think running forwards is normal. If everybody thought that running was supposed to be done backwards, and somebody ran faster forwards, they would not be cheating, they would be operating within the rules of the race. Shoot, if somebody beats you in a race running backwards they should be fine. Maybe they run really fast that way, who knows? They're still running a fucking race, they're just doing it in the most optimal way possible.

If you want your "have to run backwards" races, then fine, there's a category for that. But for this category, this is the fastest anyone has run the race. And it is pretty damn impressive. Tell me, when you look at the spiral staircase at the end there, with the randomly generated meteors, do you think to yourself "yeah, hitting one of these random meteors could speed up my run if I do it right." And when you see a bottle, do you think of it as a magical teleportation device? No, that is crazy talk, and it is really hard to come up with. People worked on this shit for years. If that isn't impressive, that some guy decided, "hey, I'm going to try to rewrite random data in this game using a bottle and some bugs," then I do not know what kind of crazy standards you have, but they are wrong. Fundamentally so.

EDIT: Hey, you want a glitchless run? Try Die Hard. No glitches abused here.
EDIT2: Switched the video, apparently agdq had some failed runs for Die Hard... somehow...
 

Caiphus

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Mar 31, 2010
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008Zulu said:
He is obviously playing the game outside of the intended spirit of it. But maybe you are all right. While we are at it, lets give back the medals to everyone who ever juiced at the Olympics.

Exploiting bugs/glitches is cheating. If he wants to set a legitimate record, have him go through the game properly.
Wow, look at all the people quoting you. I'll join in!

In any case, I agree with you (despite the Olympics analogy being quite off). If one of my friends told me that he'd beaten, say, Mass Effect in 20 minutes, but
glitched from Eden Prime to the final fight with Saren
I wouldn't personally count that. I'd be impressed that he found a glitch. But yeah, I wouldn't call it "beating the game in 20 minutes".

But you and me, 008Zulu, we clearly aren't part of the speedrunning community. This appears to be something that is within the rules and spirit of speedrunning in that community (which is where your Olympic analogy falls down). But I personally, and this seems to be the same with you, think of a glitchless clean run when I, in my mind, think of speedrunning.

Now, according to other posts above me, that is an actual category with its own records. Which is fantastic.
 

softclocks

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008Zulu said:
I don't recognize his achievement. Exploiting glitches to beat a game should invalidate the entire effort.
I'm with you 100%.

This might not be the current rules of the speedrunning game, but this sort of invalidates the whole achievement for me.

Why is 19 minutes impressive? He skipped all of the content. How am I supposed to gauge that time? 19 minutes as compared to the other guy who spent 19 minutes and 20 seconds because he made a few missteps?
 

Ferisar

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Caiphus said:
Now, according to other posts above me, that is an actual category with its own records. Which is fantastic.
Of course it is, because at the end of the day a person doing a run with a glitch that skips half the game is obviously not at a handicap against someone who ISN'T skipping half the game. Most speed-runs have goals in mind, very few are just freeform. I guess if you give one of them a "beat this game as fast as humanly possible using whatever method is available to you" it's kind of a free-for-all format, but those tend to self-categorize because of how optimal routes work.

But yeah, it's really not that weird. It happens in every game. Same with da doods who beat Dark Souls 1 under an hour.

EDIT: The original article can probably use mentioning that speed-runs are done under formats, such as all-bosses/no exploits/etc etc. Otherwise we're going to have a bunch of people complaining that those pesky speed-runners don't care about what they're playing or something.
 

Adeptus Aspartem

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I agree with the people who say it's crazy effort etc. because it is. Finding those glitches and exploiting the game is though work and hard to pull off.
But for me it's still less impressive than glitchless. Glitches are hard to find, once you know them, they're just pattern memorization like all speedruns glitchless or otherwise.
And softclocks makes a good point: Cosmos time is only impressive directly compared to other glitch-runners while a glitchless run can be compared to the normal gamer.
Same with all the olympics analogies. The reason why Bolt is such an amazing runner is because we all know how fast we are in 100m dash and can see that he's nearly as fast as a car. There's comparison that makes the feat look amazing.

Cosmos is a few seconds faster than another professional with no comparison to the average gamer, i can't gauge if 19min is fast or not. What if the glitch-runner scene is not that competitve because of a small size? What if an exceptional runner could achieve 18?

Again, that's not a try to find reasons to dismiss glitch-runs as impressive feats since the work behind it is enormous. Sometimes it just bugs me that they tend to overshadow glitchless runs, because they've lower numbers due to the fact they skip up to 80-90% of the game.
Maybe i just approve the more mechanical/concentration heavy glitch-less version to the more creative/work-heavy glitch runs *shrug*
 

Joccaren

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Mar 29, 2011
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I'm impressed at the fact he managed to glitch the game and put in the effort to the end in the fastest time possible.

I'm not impressed in the sense of "Wow, he beat OoT in under 19 minutes!" as he didn't. Its "He glitched OoT in under 19 minutes", which whilst a feat in itself, ain't really that impressive IMO. If someone had actually beaten OoT in 19 minutes that'd be phenomenal, though I'd think there's probably 19 minutes of cutscene in the game so its basically impossible.

So yeah, good on him for beating everyone else at glitching, but saying "He beat OoT in under 19 minutes" is like saying an Olympic runner ran a marathon in 30 seconds - 'cause he ran from the start line across the circular field straight to the finish line, then claimed that since he crossed the finish line he'd finished the race, rather than doing the full 10 laps or W/E of a circular track. Yeah, 30 seconds might be an impressive time to run that distance [Or not, I have NFI], but its not running the marathon in 30 seconds. Its running across the track in 30 seconds, which isn't near as impressive.
 

CyberAkuma

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008Zulu said:
I don't recognize his achievement. Exploiting glitches to beat a game should invalidate the entire effort.
Hence why its called AN "ANY% RUN".
You can't complain that an any% speedrun includes glitches because that is the entire point - to beat the game from start to finish without clearing as little as possible during the run.

If you want to see a 100% boss run run they are countless of speedruns where they do that.
 

SonicWaffle

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How can you kill the final boss with your starting equipment, anyway? IIRC (though it's been a while) don't you need the Master Sword to play tennis with Ganondorf and the Megaton Hammer to whomp Ganon's tail?
 

Creator002

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StewShearer said:
the version of the game being played here is the Japanese edition which is faster during cutscenes than the English and PAL releases.
Actually, I believe it's the Chinese version played on an iQue system. However, it is that version rather than English for the reason of speed. Japanese is used for the Gamecube Wind Waker for speed.

Good for Cosmo, though. I sometimes catch his Twitch streams if I'm lucky and I always look forward to watching his runs, even if he fails horribly.
 

Domogo

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Creator002 said:
StewShearer said:
the version of the game being played here is the Japanese edition which is faster during cutscenes than the English and PAL releases.
Actually, I believe it's the Chinese version played on an iQue system. However, it is that version rather than English for the reason of speed. Japanese is used for the Gamecube Wind Waker for speed.

Good for Cosmo, though. I sometimes catch his Twitch streams if I'm lucky and I always look forward to watching his runs, even if he fails horribly.
I was going to post this but you beat me to it.

The I-Que is used because of two reasons, one the Chinese text is slightly faster then Japanese, and two there is less game lag which saves time in the collapsing tower portion of the end game.

There are plenty of reason why you dont use I-Que for anything other then Any% but those aren't relevant.