Inject Ocarina Of Time Remake Speedruns Straight Into My Veins

If you’ve ever tuned into a Games Done Quick speedrunning charity marathon, odds are you’ve at least caught a portion of a Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speedrun. Between a base game that people have spent decades mining for skips and a thriving randomizer scene, it’s a bonafide speedrunning classic (in addition to being a regular classic). Now there’s a full remake, and you know what that means: new speedrunning techniques. In other words, The Good Stuff.

When a big new game comes out, the speedrunning community enters a period of discovery—a wondrous time of oddities and impossibilities. The Ocarina of Time remake sprinkles its own unique spice into the cauldron: Which skips still work? What has changed? How can speedrunners take advantage of what is functionally a new engine for this very old game?

Given that the Ocarina of Time remake came out last week, speedrunners have only just begun to tug at its seams. But what they’ve discovered so far is tantalizing. For example:

And of course, given that Ocarina’s remake shares tech with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, players have figured out multiple ways to jump really, really high. (This is made all the more notable by the fact that the original Ocarina didn’t have a jump button at all.)

One involves hookshot physics and certain environmental objects (combined with a jump) and seems to have great potential—by which I mean it will make the audience at AGDQ say “wheeeeee” a lot.

Another sees players cycle through items in a menu—that, once again, wasn’t in the original game—to extend leaps near-infinitely.

Ocarina of Time heralds from a different era, one before patches and hotfixes were an everyday occurrence for console games. Some of its glitches have more history than entire games. Will the Nintendo of today allow the glitches and skips speedrunners have already discovered to persist and build their own legacies? Time—yes, like from the game!—will tell.

But one player has already completed the most important speedrun of all, and nobody can ever take that away from them.

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