Watch in awe as someone demolishes old-school Legend of Zelda on the NES as fast as possible.
According to How Long To Beat, a typical Zelda run takes about 10 hours to beat. This speedrun by Darkwing_Duck_sda though? 30 minutes and 29 seconds. The next Zelda record, according to Zelda Speedruns, is also held by Darkwing, and it clocks in at 30 minutes and 37 seconds. After that comes in LackAttack24 at 30 minutes and 41 seconds. As always, seconds make all the difference.
And if you’re curious about how this run is done, this page might be of interest — most notably, here’s the explanation behind a common glitch that you can see in the speedrun above:
To clip through a wall (screen scroll glitch), you must stand toward that wall and be a specific amount of pixels away from the wall (either 5 or 7, the amount escapes me at the moment) and then move one frame in a side direction. This will cause Link to turn around, but stay on the same pixel. Then you can move through the wall. You only get to move through a half step of solid wall, but that’s enough to clip through things that are set diagonally, or push you through the screen transition “wall.” Clipping through the edge of the screen sends you to the other side.
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4 responses to “The Original Legend Of Zelda Beaten In 30 Minutes, A New World Record”
And don’t forget that the TAS version (that is, tool assisted speedrun) is about 8 minutes faster than that. Make of that what you will, but TAS videos take almost as much effort as playing the game normally.
TAS are “cheating” speedruns though. They allow you to do things in the game that would not normally be possible (for example, save states).
SDA makes the point about playing the games on their original hardware.
I feel like people throw the word cheating around a lot in speed runs without actually understanding it imo. It’s not “cheating”, it’s just a different challenge. As long as we don’t compare tool assisted runs with player runs then there’s no problem. Cheating would be more like, editing a video of your speedrun and tweaking frame rates or something so it looks like you were faster than you actually were. Even that though would be more than likely obvious to pros examining the video.
This is why I said “cheating” with quotes around it 🙂