Pure Luck (and Glitch Hunting) Shaves Minutes off the Most Competitive Ocarina of Time Speedrun
Posted on February 25 2024 by Nicole Scott
The famous Ocarina of Time Any% speedrun world record (WR) by Murph_E hits the game’s ending cutscene in an astonishing three minutes, 50 seconds, and 950 milliseconds using a complex technique called Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). However, the most competitive, active Ocarina speedrun community is the “Defeat Ganon No Stale Reference Manipulation (SRM)” category, which used to be the Any% method before ACE was discovered.
On January 18th, 2024, one speedrunner, Daniel Baamonde (or Dannyb), accidentally toppled the conventional “No SRM” route, which has 1,135 recorded runners at the time of writing. The discovery has been in the making since 2017, after a video from Dannyb sparked ideas in dedicated glitch hunters, and has since demolished the category’s WR pace.
Curious how this happened? Prepare yourself for some intense speedrunner jargon.
First, let’s explore the traditional 2012 “Wrong Warp” route, known by runners as “Ganondoor,” first discovered by runners r0bd0g and sockfolder. The run relied on a strategy allowing runners to warp through a door in the Great Deku Tree to Ganon’s Castle, hence the name Ganondoor. The major beats of the route included getting Deku Sticks, defeating Queen Gohma, obtaining a Bottle through item manipulation, and timing jumps around the end-of-dungeon portal to clip into a door. In May 2023, a WR of 12 minutes and 57 seconds was set by Lazoots using this method in a near-perfect run.
But the possibility for an even better time was just waiting to be discovered. A 2017 video by Dannyb showed the runner experimenting with Room Duplication (RD) glitches — discovered by glitch hunter Glitches0and0stuff in 2009 — in Dodongo’s Cavern. RD duplicates collision and all static and dynamic polygons, or dynapolys, in a loadable map. Simply, these are the immovable aspects, like floors, and acting objects, like chests and moving pillars.
However, duplicating the central room in the Cavern so many times removes collision physics and changes the traits of the polygons completely. After flying and clipping through walls and floors for a little while, Dannyb experienced a game crash in a very specific spot on the bridge above the Dodongo skull. The video was a massive question mark in the community for years.
In 2024, glitch hunter Natalyahasdied explained why collision seemingly disappeared in Dannyb’s testing. RD resulted in dynapoly duplication and eventual memory corruption, making static polygons seemingly disappear. When the right duplicated dynapolys aligned, a loading zone was born. MrCheeze, another prominent contributor to this development, identified the numerical values for every scene exit within a map. As it so happens, there is a way to layer dynapolys in Dodongo’s Cavern to exit into Ganon’s Castle.
He explains the process in his video “Ocarina of Time – Wrong Warp to Any Scene (without SRM):“
“The basic idea of dynapoly overflow is that if we load too many actors that have solid collision at once, the data for that collision will overflow its buffer and end up corrupting the scene’s collision data. This most significantly can be used to generate collision that acts as a loading zone.”
This is how Dannyb confirmed the existence of Dynapoly Corruption Wrong Warping, creating a door through the floor in Dodongo’s Cavern to the Ganon’s Tower Collapse sequence.
Ocarina of Time speedrunners are now in the age of “Ganonfloor.” Watch the magic happen in Dannyb’s recent video right here.
Now, the run looks completely different. Instead of bothering with the Great Deku Tree, runners need another long list of highly precise glitches in their arsenal. Some of the wildest include obtaining Bombchus from the Kakariko well and frame-perfect pausing to set up the warp — all without the Kokiri Sword or Ocarina.
As of February 2024, the current Defeat Ganon No SRM WR is ten minutes, 52 seconds, and 850 milliseconds, held by TKC. Since the glitch’s discovery, competitors have submitted WR-breaking runs almost daily. The route is still fresh, so it’s impossible to know what optimizations expert runners will find before year’s end. Do you think a sub-ten-minute run is possible? Keep your eyes peeled on the Speedrun.com leaderboards for the next mind-boggling attempt.
Would you try any of these glitches yourself with the refreshed route? Or are speedruns something you prefer to just marvel at? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
Source: Daniel Baamonde (via LunaticJ, Gamesradar)
Nicole Scott is writer for Zelda Dungeon from suburban Appalachia. She loves drinking espresso, seeing live music, building LEGO sets, being a completionist, and snuggling her two probably-alien cats, Tizo and Alarielle.
