Zelda fans are still finding ways to break Wind Waker, 20 years later

9 hours ago 2

You need a master’s degree to understand this speedrun

Believe it or not, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker can be beaten in under 30 minutes. That's thanks to a complicated new speedrunning trick that was showcased at this year's Awesome Games Done Quick. It involves some fast swimming, a camera, and a whole lot of numbers.

For speedrunners, Wind Waker is a notoriously exploitable game. It features legendary skips that shave hours off the game, including the ability to bypass an invisible barrier surrounding Hyrule Castle. Tricks like that have been showcased at previous Games Done Quick speedrunning events, including last January when the game was beaten at AGDQ in just under an hour. This year, runner EJ125 cut that time in half, taking the game down to just over 28 minutes.

How is that possible? You need to see it to believe it, but you might walk away even more confused.

It begins with a glitch that allows players to hypercharge Link's swim speed, letting him leave the game's opening Windfall Island and get the Wind Waker early. From there, EJ125 swims back to Windfall Island and visits Tingle to get the Picto Box, an in-game camera. Things get very, very convoluted from there.

In layman's terms, the new trick essentially uses the Picto Box to manipulate the game's memory, teleporting Link directly to the ending of the game from Windfall Island. To do that, players have to take a pixel perfect photo of a bush. That photo contains a very specific value that, through a series of very complicated steps, allows players to build a code payload that gets sent to a second controller. That rewrites the player's screen data, allowing them to warp to the ending after going through a door. It's basically programming the game from inside out.

EJ125 showed off some other ways to mess with Wind Waker in a bonus showcase using the Arbitrary Code Execution technique. He's able to get into the game's debug menu and access test areas that exist in a specific version of the game. Most mind-blowing of all is when he takes a photo of the audience in attendance at AGDQ and inserts it into the game. You really do just have to see it for yourself.

This year's Awesome Games Done Quick event raised over $2.44 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. You can watch videos of all the featured runs on GDQ's YouTube channel. (We especially recommend checking out the show's very fun Mario Kart World speedrun.)

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