For anyone who wasn't tuned in to Awesome Games Done Quick last week - the charity marathon where people try to speedrun a variety of games as fast as possible - you may want to watch this video to witness ClaireLynnD's incredible wizardry to complete The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask in just under 27 minutes.
Up until the end, the speedrun is relatively normal: Lynn plays the game in Japanese, which reduces the time it takes to "read" the text, but otherwise she does play the first dungeon relatively straight. About 12 minutes into the run, Lynn takes Deku Scrub Link outside, and starts cutting a bunch of grass, with commentator Riley promising that it'll make sense later.
25 minutes in, Lynn begins cutting grass again, and Riley starts explaining that it's all about controlling what's in the memory of the game, in order to make the game do exactly what the speedrunner wants. Then, it's on to something they call the "Moon Dance": a precise set of actions, performed within the Observatory, that further manipulates the memory of the game. The Moon Dance looks a lot like dropping bombs and walking around in circles, but it's all purposeful - it's code that Riley, the commentator, wrote to trick the game into triggering the end sequence.
While Riley is describing what's on screen, Lynn finishes the Moon Dance, stating "that's time, by the way". What a cool way to end a speedrun.
Did you tune in to AGDQ this year? What was your favourite speedrun? Come chat to us in the comments!
[source youtube.com]
Comments 12
wow thats fast
These memory manipulation tricks are really quite cool. It was amazing seeing Zfg discovering the ability to run arbitrary code in Ocarina of Time, it was a pretty crazy discovery!
Gotta go fast
For anyone who doesn't get speed running or straight up hates it, it's just a different way to enjoy the game and master it. Some skip to the end glitches may be a bit unimpressive or uninteresting, but most speed running tricks require a lot of practice and precision to pull off, so just because someone skips a boss, or something like that doesn't mean they aren't good. And for those who still don't like that, that's why 100% speed runs are a thing as well
Yeah I agree, games are there to be enjoyed how you want. Whether the developer intended or not. Have fun with games how you want to xxx
Code he wrote? I don’t understand the story, whether he ran stock game code or not.
Either way, MM is Fantastic.
Is Nintendo gonna do anything N64 on switch?
@nerdface
It's, uh, complicated. They're essentially "hacking" the game... via extremely precise in-game actions.
https://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/srm/srm-overview
I want Ocarina and Majora to come to Switch so badly. Majora's Mask is still my favorite Zelda game of all time. I'm hoping BotW2 can dethrone it, but we'll see.
@nessisonett I know you're probably joking and I'm writing this for no reason, but in case anyone reading this didn't know, zfg didn't discover it, he just uses it in speedruns.
@bagajr Well he was at least part of the group pursuing ACE as the holy grail of speedrunning tricks. I was more referring to him spawning the Arwings.
Wow, way to conquer my favorite game... XD
@Christofu
100 agreed. And as someone who didn’t really understand speedrunning at first and thought it‘s just people messing around with the game I highly recommend watching Summoning Salt on YouTube. He really shows how there is a passionate community respectfully competing with each other.
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