A Speedrunner Just Beat Ocarina of Time in 18 Minutes

@andrewb: Yeah, the scriptedness of it is kind of a bummer. Cosmo is weirdly charismatic when speaking off the cuff, but this is kinda dry. I guess the background on the history of the speedrun is probably useful for some media outlets?

Here you go, guys. The Cosmo commentary edition - aka the video he wanted to include with all the press hype he got for it.

Although it being obviously read from a script makes it less interesting if you already know what techniques he's using.

@topsteer: depends on the glitches, the ones he exploits is pretty damn impressive and fascinating.

It may be boring to watch but it's infinitely more impressive than exploiting glitches.

Ok, I got it. I thought with the use of the term 'Speed Runners' these guys where like hackers or something. Now I can appreciate his efforts, good on him!

Man that was an insane run. Loved his outburst when his glitch in the tower went through lol. At first I thought he messed up and was angry, but turned out he was just outright pumped.

Love seeing these crazy runs where the most messed up glitches happen and you're just like "How the hell did anyone figure this shit out?"

Do I need to watch every cutscene and read every line of dialog if I do a speedrun, too? I mean you're skipping part of the "intended experience" if you don't so it can't be a real speedrun...

Believe me, there's no such thing as picking at random to bust a record out in speedrunning. Cosmo has been at this for nearly 10 years now, and has been integral to the development of routing for Ocarina. You don't waste that much time on a whim.

"Defacing a classic story game," give me a break. Speedrunners existing and using glitches in their runs doesn't stop you or anyone else from playing the game traditionally and enjoying the story. This run is amazing; it's essentially a string of frame-perfect tricks, which is almost unfathomable to me. I feel accomplished when I get a one-frame link in Street Fighter after twenty consecutive tries, let alone doing it many times perfectly within an 18-minute time span.

The degree of skill and dedication this whole thing took is insane, from developing all the muscle memory involved in all the tricks to learning the game inside and out by using emulators and memory hack tools to gain a better understanding of the tricks, etc., etc. I know he makes everything look pretty effortless, but there isn't an easy trick in the run.

There is literally nobody else on the planet who can beat this time right now. It will probably never be beaten until new strategies emerge. This is not cheapened by the fact that there are glitches; it is just the nature of the run, the nature of these sorts of categories in speedrunning.

Personally, I love seeing games get broken in creative and difficult ways. Glitches can be easy to find, especially in earlier 3D games, but to be able to find out ways to make them work for beating the game faster? Crazy. Ocarina of Time itself is essentially filled with miracles: the way he warps right to the collapsing tower happens because of perfect math regarding the way the game handles cutscenes. The whole thing is like that.

Long message, but the detractors really get my goat.

@ptys: He has done a glitchless 100% speed run of OOT but it's like 3 hours and so boring.

Well if these people are finishing games like Ocarina beforehand and taking in the whole experience, that's fair. What I take issue with is someone just picking any random game and busting it for the sake of beating a score. Half the time he's running backwards, and hammering through the dialogue which makes the game look terrible. Surely he can prove his skills without defacing a classic story game like this where alot of its charm comes from the music, setting and characters.

Cosmo is good shit.

When you're down that rabbit-hole, its all news. And there's very little trivial about glitches. When I was a kid, the only way I could beat Vigilante was because I somehow managed to glitch the lives counter up. I still don't know how I did it. I keep going back to Super Mario Sunshine trying to glitch to that shine in the beach hut in Gelato Beach but I can't roll the fruit up the slope.

I'll try for 20 minutes and then decide my efforts might've been better just trying to beat the levels. And then fail at the levels.

I'm not good at games, guys.

I didn't realise new speedrunner times qualified as news now...

Just took the time and watched the run. Gotta say, I don't really see the appeal or achievement of this sort of a speed run. Unless I'm mistaken, is he not just exploiting glitches? So it's not a matter of beating the game quickly, but rather it's about who can exploit the game's glitches the most quickly? This feels empty to me. It's cool that there are people out there who enjoy doing it, but it seems like a complete waste of life and time. Curious to hear the interview to broaden my thoughts if Patrick gets the chance.

There is still some confusion going on in this thread regarding speedrunning categories. I can elaborate just a bit more with some examples from popular games. Please understand that speedruns are classified this way because it is consensus among speedrunning community that it is impossible to officiate what does and does not constitute a glitch or exploit; and that strictly adhering to 'pure' non-exploit gameplay has proven to be quite boring to watch. Glitches are often what makes a run special and what gives it staying power over many years as new things are discovered to speed up the run. Common categories are:

Any% - beat the game as fast as possible with no other restrictions save that you must use an official copy of the game (emulators sometimes allowed) and standard input control (no programmable controllers, no macros, no turbo, etc.). This is Cosmo's OOT run category. OOT also has a 100% category. OOT 100% is about 3 hours long.

Any% + specific modifier - If a game's any% is extremely short or unsatisfying, some games have this type of category. Sticking with Zelda theme, A Link To The Past has Any% - No save and quit. For that one, the save and quit exploit makes the run really tedious to do and run is much better without it. Thus the modifier. Also, there is Amnesia Any% - No out of bounds. Amnesia any% is basically a 3D platformer where you're out of bounds most of the time. However, the no out of bounds run is also boring boring boring to play and watch. Portal is another with an Any% - No OoB category. You'll also see things like Any% - Best Ending, Any% - Expert Mode, etc.

100% - do all the things, get all the stuff. There might be extra criteria involved in this kind of category if the game requires it. Super Meat Boy 100%, for example, is actually called 106% because of the 6 glitch girl stages.

All bosses - Dark Souls is a notable for this one. It includes all the DLC bosses. Santzo84 has WR for Dark Souls - All bosses with a time of 1:20:46 (in game time). He also holds the Any% WR for it with 51:01. Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night also has this category.

Low% - usually a challenge run of some sort. Usually means beat the game with starting items only or only specific required items to beat the game. Super Metroid has this category. Spelunky does as well. Spelunky low% is beat the game with starting equipment only + non-inventory pick up and throw items (rocks, mines, damsels, bodies etc.)

Game specific criteria - such as Mario 64; 70 star or 120 star or 16 star or i dunno I think there are more too. This is because that game can be completed with zero stars collected in a very short amount of time. Extra categories added in the interest of competition and fun. Super Mario Bros. has Any% and Warpless.

Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS) - programmable controllers and all of that allowed. break the game, cut it apart, put it back together to go fast.

Hope that helps.

Yep. Also, if entering a name is required part of the game that you perform while the timer is running (Dark Souls 2 is like that), runners will just put in whatever they can to get through the menu as fast as possible. Like Pokemon runner Werster, who traditionally always names his player character 'I'.

People are getting a bit upset over semantics here. To me, this is a wonderful display of skill and dedication. It's not just (about) someone beating Ocarina of Time in 18 minutes. It has hardly anything to do with the game, really. This is about technical wizardry turned into measurable perfection, and it's amazing to see it done so well and with such soul.

It's easier to appreciate with the video from last year where he explains all the glitches though. I can imagine that it looks like some guy 'cheating' as fast as possible to a first-time viewer. This stuff is not easy to do.

I don't know if it's the case with this game specifically but it does save time to have a shorter name in some games. Final Fantasy 6 for example people will rename every character to only the first letter of the name except the last 2 or 3 characters they recruit. For those character the amount of time it takes to rename them (we're talking maybe 1-2 seconds here) is greater than the potential time save being so close to the end of the run.

Some people don't understand the various categories of speedruns that exist and proceed to get angry. That's a new one for me. I know many reasons, rational or not, to get angry about games but this isn't one of them. Or wasn't until now anyway.

Some people are depressing.

Y'all hate fun.

It is much easier to beat OoT in 20 hours, than it is 18 minutes.

Awesome accomplishment. I'm not a speedrunner at all, so this might be common knowledge, but I noticed that he named himself "C" on his file and I was wondering if it's actually a speedrunning technique to give yourself a one-character name so that the text bubbles finish faster. If so, it's pretty sick that they are so thorough with their time-shaving efforts that they even thought of something like that. Speedrunning is crazy. I'd probably never get into something like that, but I think it's cool that people do it and I find it interesting when whole communities get together to figure out a way to break a game and play it in ways unintended by the developers.

@megabobbyflay: So what you're saying is beating the game the normal way, which almost all of us did when we were 10, is what "takes skill"

Wheras this thing that literally only Cosmo has ever done, because it's that difficult, doesn't.

Ok, buddy.

Glitch vs. Glitchless?

Both.

Dem 4 seconds though....

I wonder will the extra pauses start to grate in his memory until he finally goes back to try improve the time. 18:10 is perfect, but 18:06? That's GODLY.

This. The Any% Speedrun category is about getting from start to finish in the fastest way possible, utilizing whatever built in exploits exist in the code. It's a different kind of skill being able to hit the smallest window to glitch forward. I've watched quite a few of Cosmo's runs where he has to take 3-4 tries at some of the glitches that he makes seem extremely simple in this particular run. This is not an easy thing to do, he just had an unreal run and set his (and the world's) new record. Why try to take that away from him because you disagree with exploiting code flaws?

There are entirely separate categories associated with completing the game without exploits, and if you're curious: the speed-run record for 100% of OoT is 4 hours and 31 minutes... so even by not doing these skips a normal clear is not necessarily 20 hours.

I will concede however that the article here does somewhat mislead a reader (who may not be aware of Any% rules/this game's glitches) that this lengthy game was completed in a ridiculously fast time. Either way, congrats Cosmo on shattering your personal best!

It's not just "a guy" who is playing by his own rules. There is a very active community that do these glitched runs in OoT. This leaderboard has 599 participants on it: http://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/leaderboards/oot/any. You're also asserting that performing these glitches is trivial and requires little to no skill. Many of the glitches performed in Cosmo's run have to be performed with frame perfect timing which means there is a 1/20th of a second window to execute. It seems like you don't know what plagiarism means either.

It baffles me how in every thread/comment section about this people lose their marbles over the glitch vs no glitch thing. Guys, why are you getting so irrationally angry? There are various speedrun categories for games. This happens to be a glitched any% run. It was executed almost flawlessly and produced a new world record time for finishing the game. That's a cool thing and that's all. Leave the torches and pitchforks for other issues.

Yea the Chinese text is even faster than the Japanese text.

Right, and everyone's subjective definition of what is outside of bounds is different, a lot of people happen to believe whether the bug or exploit is within the code or put into the code by an outside device it's still cheating. The only way to make a fair comparison is if everyone plays by the same rules. If everyone is off doing their own thing because "in my opinion its not cheating" then there's no competition because everyone is playing some different modified new version in their own world. There's no half measure.

What we have here is a guy who designed his own game around tasks contained in the cart, got popular because the game was OoT, and got very very skilled at some weird player hack of a game with new rules. The article is leading with a foot that's implying this is somehow a feat connected with OoT, equating a 20 hour normal clear with flawed code that created an entirely separate game.

As someone who grew up in 8 and 16 bit eras, these types of articles are misleading fresh blood into believing taking advantage of glitched code is skill at the game. It's disrespectful to those who put effort into creating the extraordinary mechanics in some of these games that were meant to be used and not exploited. It's almost a form of plagiarism.

Oh, I don't think that's a fair comparison at all. These are exploits within the game's design, not cheat codes thrust onto the game by an outside device. Those are very, very different.

@patrickklepek

Sweet, looking forward to this, mostly because I wrote a piece on him last year. It's here if you're interested in reading.

The Chinese version is on a piece of (somewhat official, don't worry) hardware called the iQue. OoT on iQue doesn't have as many frame drops during the scene where Ganon's messed up version of Hyrule Castle crashes at the end, I believe? That might be wrong, but it saves frames somewhere. Maybe in the text.

I wonder if we're going to have to change the Kotaku joke to Giant Bomb now...

The reason for the anti-glitch sentiment is because it gives a false impression of what it means to be skilled at the game.

This guy may be good at glitching doors or zipping walls or whatever, but these are just glitched tasks using the assets contained on the cart or disc, they do not complete the mandatory content sanctioned by the developers to call it a run. It's disrespectful to those skilled at completing the tasks mandated by the game's rules to say OoT was beaten in 18 minutes, because it implies a false sense of skill at OoT. I'm sure he is skilled at OoT. But the video is not OoT. It's some other game with arbitrary rules using the cartridge assets.

I am not the best Ironsword player if I stick in a game genie and start at Inner Ice Fire Mountain and beat the game in 3 minutes. Both are cheating, one is putting in a game genie, one is using exploits. Maybe I'm actually good at Ironsword, but that's neither here nor there when we discuss Ironsword.

I wonder if there's a particular reason for playing the Chinese version of the game? I've heard how the Japanese version of Ocarina is preferred over the US version by speedrunners because it has fewer frames or something but I've never seen a Chinese version before.

@patrickklepek: It's just a personal preference of mine, but I find being able to speed run something to 100% without exploiting game breaking glitches to be much more impressive. Not only are you playing through the game the way the designers intended, but being able to prove you're the absolute best at it. Different strokes for different folks. I'm just glad it's classified differently.

Speedrunners play games for fun, too. Besides which, if they weren't enjoying themselves, do you really think they'd be dedicating so much time to speedrunning in the first place?

I don't really understand the anti-glitch sentiment. It's a specific type of speedrun, not the only way to speedrun. Anyway, hope to illuminate thoughts on stuff like that when I meet with Cosmo next week, and maybe I can convince him to do a speedrun live for us. :)

I have seen the sentiment echoed from others in this thread I do not understand at all, first this is an Any% run there are tons of different types of runs. Also how in the world do you not find these insane cool looking glitches to be interesting? Hitting a frame perfect spot that causes you to boost backwards at insane speeds to get to that exit door 3 secs faster is Insane and looks cool as hell. There are tons of 100% runs where they do the whole thing Cosmo at the end even speaks to doing a full run of OoT. Theres nothing easy or lame about some of those glitches or anything that makes it less "legit".

That exist. Every games have plenty of different categories. There are any% like this where anything goes, there are 100% where you can still use glitches but have to do everything nonetheless and there are glitchless categories too. Each have their own separate records to beat.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't find glitches as novel as I used to do in the past. I'd be more impressed if speedrunners beat games legit like the rest of us.

hehe, I remember just last year he was saying that the rock fall bit at the end would only be possible tool assisted, and now here we are. Was awesome seeing Cosmo run and explain this at AGDQ in 2013 and it was pretty sweet watching him hit 18:10 the other day. Amazing run, looking forward to the interview.

I can't even keep up with what's happening or what he's doing exactly. Then suddenly it's over.

I am sure its just a typo, but I assume you meant glitched runs vs. single segment any% runs. In that case, you are probably right.

Speed runs go against the whole spirit gaming for me which is about having fun, not completing some numbers task... IMO

This is poetry.

As was the run. People don't appreciate how much work goes in to a run like this. He has put thousands of hours into becoming so good at this game. It's not about the world record. It's not even about the personal best. It's about, for lack of a better word, perfection. This run is the end product of months, years even, of playing, research and failed attempts due to small but devastating random elements. It's beautiful, because a community of people (Cosmo in particular, but also others) put their heart and soul into it.

Sure, they might discover some other glitch that breaks the game event further. But right now, this is as good as it gets, and it might well be as good as it ever will be.