I haven't been paying attention to the status of speedrunning in The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time for a few years now. I was involved in route planning for Mike Damiani's runs which were around the five hour mark. Then a whole load of really difficult glitches started coming up. SDA doesn't accept glitches which allow people to pass through walls and I didn't particularly care to keep up with the pace of technology. I don't know.

Anyway, in the time I've been away, it looks like OoT has been completely broken into its components. I don't really care for SDA much anyway because they would probably rule out most of this: ZeldaSpeedRuns have tricks which allow you to actually write specific data to specific locations in memory, thereby acquiring the Shadow and Spirit Medallions without completing either Temple. Or the Fire, Water or Forest Temples. You can also glitch through the Door Of Time. So you can skip all of young Link's dungeons too. And there are some other glitches which--

Okay, let's just cut to it. The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, no holds barred completion run, 1 hour 14 minutes 6 seconds.

I don't really care about the "spirit of the game". Short of Crooked Cartridge, which is actual hardware tampering and therefore means that you aren't actually playing the same game as standard OoT anymore, I'm happy to say "anything goes" when this is the kind of improvement that allowing these glitches opens up. If the record was 5 hours and the glitch saved 1 second, I would say no. But exploiting fundamental programming errors in the game itself to such a huge effect: it's a whole different ball park.

The really amazing part is that this seems to have gone down largely unnoticed. I mean, I would have expected to hear about it from somewhere, if somebody without GameSharks, cheating or substantial forward planning managed to knock OoT off in less than an hour and a quarter. Maybe I'm just out of touch and the record is much lower still? Maybe someone broke an hour since then? Still, this feels like a great achievement which more people should know about. Insane research like this makes me feel warm inside. To think I used to time this junk by hand!

Good show. Keep it up.