Ah, speed-runners who do the impossible. A few days ago, the world record for beating Ocarina of Time was nineteen minutes and twenty seconds according to Zelda Speed Runs. Then, noted speed-runner Cosmo Wright came along and beat the game in a record nineteen minutes and fifteen seconds—and you can watch him do it above.


Five seconds, that's all it takes to make a difference. Dang.

Two curious things here. 1) He's playing on a slightly faster version of the game. He explains that a little in the video, but the important part here is that it's not like he's hiding what version he's playing on or anything. If you're really curious about the differences in all the versions of the game, Cosmo breaks it down in a blog post here. It's technical, but interesting—and it breaks down the ways in which this version is faster.


2) Wait, Zelda Speed Runs? What about Speed Demos Archive, isn't that the go-to source for stuff like speed-run times?

"SDA is pretty outdated. Speedrunning is in this transitional state right now where we are trying to build a leaderboards site that can catalog all the actual fastest runs," Wright told me via email yesterday, when I inquired about his claim that this was a world record. "Unfortunately we're still a bit off from that, so information is scattered everywhere. Luckily, there's a site here for various Zelda games that shows off all the fastest runs."

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Wright has been playing Ocarina of Time on and off since 2005, and only started going after the record a couple of weeks ago.

EDIT: 3) Since there seems to be a lot of confusion: the speedrunning community has a lot of different types of runs. There are ones without glitches, there are ones where any % of completion is accepted, and ones where you need to get 100%. All are valid, and in some cases, doing something other than a 100% speedrun requires more skill, not less.