During the years since its release, speedrunners have been mining the underbelly of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to find glitches and shortcuts to achieve more and more impressive feats of rapid game completion. Many speedrunning fans are familiar with the achievement of Runnerguy2489, who managed 100% game completion back in 2015 while blindfolded.
In the days since, and for some time now, the challenge goal for this particular game in the speedrunning community has been to manage Any% time under 17 minutes. And a few days ago, Torje from Norway managed just that.
Played on a Wii Virtual Console, his run was the culimation of a four-year effort in the speedrunning community to finish the game by any means necessary in less than 17 minutes, or 1020 seconds. If you have 16:58 minutes to watch the video of the achievement, you’ll notice a slew of glitches, warps, and special maneuvers to reach Ganon—notably, involving a bottle instead of a Deku Nut.
This means Torje now holds the World Record for the Ocarina of Time speedrun—though the longevity of his title may be in question. During his reflection post on the game, he noted several mistakes that cost time time. His current aim is to fix those and reach completion in 16:55—of course, anyone else can make the attempt in the meantime. The new goal for the game will likely be simply chipping a second here or there off the current time.
If you’ve got a little over 15 minutes to spare today, give it watch and enjoy! (Fair warning, there is some colorful language involved.)
