Speedrunner Gets $1,000 Donation While Playing Ocarina Of Time Thanks To Sheer Luck 

Speedrunner Cheese was attempting a 100% run of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time when the unthinkable happened. A Twitch viewer in the chat dropped a cool grand on the streamer to celebrate some bizarre random number generation.

100% speedruns require players to do just about everything there is to do in a game. In Ocarina of Time, that means not only beating every dungeon but also collecting everything, including every heart.

Some of those hearts require heart pieces, one of which is buried in a graveyard in the game’s Kakariko Village. When players visit between 18:00 and 21:00 during the evening, they can pay the grave yard attendant, Dampe, to go on a tour in which he digs up graves. Each tour costs 10 rupees, and often his efforts turn up nothing, but every so often his shovel will hit upon a heart piece.

It’s completely random whether it does, however, meaning it could take just a few tries or several before the treasure turns up.

Cheese wasn’t having the best go of things during his recent 100% attempt of the game, but somehow managed to stumble upon the heart piece on the very first grave, an incredibly rare event. So rare that one of the commenters in the Twitch chat had previously said “First try Dampe and I’ll donate $1000.”

That commenter was StrawhatDaxter and after a few minutes of the rest of the chat egging him on and re-pasting in his earlier promise, they paid up. The notification flickered onto Cheese’s screen with an automated text-to-speech voice announcing “Fuck me.” The chat broke out into disbelief, as did Cheese’ face.

“What’s happening here?” Cheese said. Stunned, he struggled to keep playing, somewhat dazed and definitely confused by what had just transpired. “Give me a second cause it’s kind of hard,” he continued. “OK what the fuck dude. What the hell. What’s happening. Did you actually just do that?

“What did you do to yourself.”

Big donations like this aren’t unheard of, and more often than not they have a tendency to get recalled or canceled after the fact.

Still, Dampe (the RNG gravedigger) is an exciting point in any 100% Ocarina of Time run, and it’s just possible that StrawhatDaxter felt compelled to celebrate the beautiful irony of the moment by emptying their bank account out a little (or a lot). The most excruciating part of the the whole affair was how unlucky Cheese’s luck was.

Speedrunners would dream of a first time Dampe, or even a second, third, or fourth, but getting him on run that’s already struggled and won’t be able to result in breaking a world record is uniquely pernicious. Then again, when have the RNG gods ever smiled upon players when they most needed it?

You can watch the entire run below, with the donation happening around three hours in.