If you have played The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask over the past 25 years (and, if you're reading this, we'd wager that you have), then you likely will have engaged in a spot of lighthearted gambling at Mamamu Yan's Doggy Racetrack. The rules of this cute minigame are simple: choose a dog, place a bet, and win big if your pick performs well. The unspoken rule is that you never pick the lone blue dog. Why? Because the blue dog never wins. At least, that's what we thought.

Blue dog's racing abilities are poor, to say the least. No matter how many times we've played the minigame ourselves or watched others take part in speedruns, the colourful canine never seems to bring back top dollar. We were content to live with this fact (not everyone is cut for racing royalty, after all), but a handful of Majora fans dared to think more positively. If you can teach an old dog new tricks, then surely blue dog can get a win.

That's what was pondered by YouTuber Vidya James (and brought to our attention by Tom's Hardware). In the above video, the channel showcased that a blue dog win is, in fact, possible. You see, there's a glitch where the doggy race can end prematurely if a select pooch hits a very specific track coordinate, granting the lucky pup first place. If blue dog was to hit that spot, then victory would be his.

The catch is that the game can produce over one quadrillion different races (thanks to the dogs' speed RNG and race conditions), which Vidya James clarified would take 34 million years to sample. Ah.

And so we arrive at the speedrunner's best friend: an emulator. YouTube channel Falkush wrote a script which would run the racing minigame at a faster speed before recording the result and automatically repeating it with a new RNG.

After 8,410 races, the script nabbed ol' Bluey (not that one) a win with the premature end glitch! A good result, no doubt, but we were never going to feel completely comfortable until we saw our little guy get the gold without the glitch.

So, Falkush did just that. Using the emulator to minmax each of the dogs' abilities to leave the blue competitor with the best race conditions possible, the Majora fan embarked (sorry) on over 30,000 race attempts until they finally, finally, got the result they were after. You know what? You can check it out for yourself below.

Okay, so yes, the successful run might have relied on a script and emulator to only produce the ideal conditions, and the chances of recreating them on a legitimate copy of the game are next to impossible, but who cares? After 25 years of losses, we finally got to see our little blue boy take the gold. The ultimate underdog.

It's far from the most game-changing discovery, and we can't see the speedrunning community adopting the technique any time soon, but we wanted something sweet to start the new year, and an unlikely prized pooch certainly delivered. Go blue dog!

What do you make of this unlikely win? Bark your thoughts in the comments.

[source youtube.com, via tomshardware.com]