Clint Stevens was Only the 2nd Best Zelda Runner in the World

How to rise rapidly in the world’s most difficult competitive endeavors

The Legend of Zelda released in 1988, sold 6.5 million copies, being the first Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game to sell over 1 million, becoming a template for the action-adventure RPG genre to be created.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, became one the highest selling Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) game with 4.6 million copies sold, while being cited by critics as one of the greatest video games of all time.

So with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Zelda’s transition from a 2D property into 3D brought with it half a million preorders, tripling pre-order numbers of any previous video game, with 1 million copies sold the first week of release. Ocarina of Time sold 7.6 million copies on the N64 (not including rereleases on other systems), entering several lists of best or most influential games, and achieving best video game of all time status within several publications through reviews.

One of the Most Difficult Games

Ocarina of Time meets this list of top 10 hardest games to speedrun

With the success, legacy, and fanbase of Ocarina of Time (OoT), OoT became a highly interested game by speedrunners. Speedrunning, is the category of competitive in video games where players compete for fastest times in finishing a game. Due to the technical requirements of some runs, and highly optimized and experienced competition, speedrunning is one of the most difficult competitive endeavors in video games.

For OoT, several speedruns exist in multiple categories. There’s the Any% category, where the goal is to finish the game as fast as possible. Anything goes, including the use of game breaking glitches. Today, the record is 16 minutes, 58 seconds.

Then, the 100% category. Each obtainable item and item upgrade must be collected before finishing the game for 100%.

What makes 100% difficult, is the length. The fastest time for the 100% category is 3 hours, 51 minutes currently, even with extensive glitches. Additionally, two hours into the run there’s a requirement with a 10% chance of successful acquisition, increasing lost time with every failed attempt. That section is where good runs can go to die, and is out of the player’s control.

As for the sections in the players control, many required glitches need highly precise inputs with very specific timings, allowing very small margins for error. A wrong input, and wrong timing, can result in minutes of time loss. Zelda is not only difficult due to the level of competition, but also due to high required levels of execution, with high levels of fail due to bad luck in any given attempt.

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The 100% Leader

The best times in the 100% category, differs by minutes. This difference is considering many players have and are competing for the past 5 to 15 years.

Differences in time for Top 10 fastest 100% Ocarina of Time competitors, with date since October 2019 from speedrun.com

In 100%, at the top is Zelda Freakin’ Glitches (ZFG), the player with the most experience, and the most world records.

Ocarina of Time 100% category world records starting in 2012

Traditionally, winners in this landscape are those with most hours of experience. Speedrunning is something that can be improved in with enough practice, since these games are single player and typically don’t receive patches, so games remains constant.

In the beginning, records for 100% swapped between a few players. As time progressed, however, ZFG’s presence at first became dominant.

Most recent Ocarina of Time 100% category world records. All of these world records are held by ZFG.

Due to ZFG’s extensive experience and persistence in the 100% category, no one has been able to dethrone him. One has gotten close. And his name is Clint Stevens.

The Rise and Fall of Clint Stevens

Clint‘s’ case is particularly of interest, not because of how close he was caught up to ZFG in time, but because how fast he rose to get there. Clint is the explosive upstart.

Clint Stevens had a meteoric rise to 2nd place in Zelda, losing a placing once to SVA in 2016, but reclaiming his position in the following months. Nearing the end of 2017, Clint stopped running Zelda, just before a game changing glitch was discovered lowering the fastest possible time dramatically. Historical data found on archives of ZeldaSpeedRuns.

I’m unaware of when Clint started Zelda, however, once entering the leaderboards, his premier was 7th place. In reducing his time by 2 minutes, within a week he ranked moved to 3rd. Within a month, he reduced his time by 10 minutes, entering 2nd place by September 30th, 2015. Being an entire minute ahead of 3rd place, he was still almost 20 minutes behind ZFG. Further decreasing his time Clint was able to enter a 4:26. Ten minutes behind ZFG. Ten minutes ahead of 3rd place.

Clint Stevens’ best times and ZFG’s best times over time. Clint retired just before 2018 to run Super Mario 64, another difficult game to speedrun. After his retirement, a new glitch allowing faster times was discovered. Historical data found on archives of ZeldaSpeedRuns.

Clint’s greatest decreases in times were made during his introduction to the leaderboards. But Clint retired, and his fastest time ended 4:22:19, just approaching ZFG’s 4:15:03.

While Clint Stevens has since stopped running Zelda competitively, his meteoric rise established him as someone willing to improve in the most difficult game endeavors, and do so quickly to become one of the top competitors within a relatively short time.

Lessons From the Fastest Improving in the Most Difficult Category of his Craft

Reflecting on his advancements, Clint Stevens offers the following on becoming highly competitive in highly difficult endevours.

Prepare for Discomfort

Difficult activities are not comfortable. Dealing with the discomfort is the first challenge.

Clint Stevens briefly came back to practice Zelda after retiring, before deciding to return to speedrun Mario 64 once again.

How to get good at something. […]You push yourself. You do a lot of things that your body isn’t comfortable with.[…] If you always try to push yourself to do the harder things that you’re not good at, eventually you’ll be good at those things.

Competitors who don’t put in the required time into an activity won’t receive the reward in improvements from time investment. Considering high levels of inherent talent can be overcome with a competitor far surpassing him in experience, barriers to acquiring experience can become troubling.

A difficult task is not only difficult, but also frustrating and uncomfortable. The difficulty itself would be more bearable were it not for the emotions it brings up while practicing and training. Difficulty brings up experiences of discomfort, frustration, and anger as part of the early learning curve. Until sufficient competency is reached at a given difficult activity, the person training will be outside of their comfort zone. Coping mechanisms to deal with this discomfort should be developed.

One obvious coping mechanism is simply pushing through the discomfort. This works in so that the discomfort is temporary, and ends as competency is acquired. Knowing the discomfort will be temporary may increase tolerance for such activities slightly.

However, other strategies exist. An environment can be created or fabricated to make such activities more comfortable. And preparation rituals can be made to ease those improving in such activities.

Start with Difficulty

Addressing difficulty, we can begin strategize accounting competition, considering there are other agents who are also getting better over time in concurrence. By not having a strategy that accounts for competition, competitors are hoping to luck themselves into winning.

It’s better to be inconsistent, and at least attempt the hard stuff. Because eventually, you’ll get that consistency. And the person who got really good at the easy stuff, they’re gonna have to relearn all the hard [material].

Because of the other competitors, we have to consider opportunity cost when it comes to what to do with available time. Multiple skills can be learned at any given moment. Deciding which skill to learn in itself is a strategic choice. Skills take much more time to learn at a high level than at a basic level. Meaning, the moment you choose to learn one skill, you’re not learning another.

With Clint Stevens, he’s competing for the fastest time. With that competitive constraint, although room exists for creativity, the fastest absolute route possible is typically common knowledge. While some routes may border on impossible due to execution, the fastest humanly possible routes are open domain. The freedom and creativity here is starting training with slower routes that are easier to execute. The fastest routes tend to have glitches of the highest difficulty to execute. For Clint, he had to choose which glitches to learn on his way to the fastest.

Clint avoids investing in becoming highly competent in the easy sections of his craft. Instead, he learns the difficult methods everyone must learn eventually to be the best, first, even at mediocre levels. Over time, everyone will learn these difficult methods to stay competitive.

Easy material is easy to learn, slow to master. Hard material is hard to learn, slow to master. The trap of learning what’s easy is the investment in time for mastery, the same time which could be invested in learning higher level material.

Choose Based on Return on Investment

For Clint, his craft is simple. He’s working towards the fastest time. Therefore, the skills he learns are pretty straight forward. He prioritizes tasks which shave off the most time.

If a trick can save off 10 seconds of time, but is highly difficult, he’ll rather choose the trick that saves one minute, but is much easier to do. In other words, he chooses what skills he learns based on return on investment (ROI).

This mindset proposes that ROI is an effective decision making concept also outside the world of finance. Where, where in finance we invest money as a resource expecting a return in money, in decision-making the investment is any resource within our capacity, including time and energy. The return of that investment is progress towards a defined goal. This reframes learning difficulty, previously discussed, as: Improving something easy may have a lower ROI than improving something difficult. Therefore, improve considering ROI.

Invest Time

Clint’s position on speedrunning is that anyone can be good if they invest enough hours to the craft. Of the people who rise very quickly in categories that are both competitive and difficult, this position seems to be the same. They spend a lot of time in the short time they rose quickly in the rank of their craft.

In summary, the Clint Stevens strategy is as follows:

Learn coping mechanisms for the discomfort common in many difficult activities so plentiful time can be invested on improvement. Choose what to improve based on Return on Investment.

And while, maybe this will only get you to 2nd best in the world within a few months of experience against dozens who’ve invested half a decade in experience, hopefully you don’t retire before becoming the best in the world, unlike Clint Stevens could have been.