The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past · SNES · Wrong Warp · Saves: Entire Dark World (roughly 30+ minutes) · Documented: 2002
A wrong warp in Hera's Tower that sends Link directly to Agahnim's Throne Room, bypassing the entire Dark World and all seven Dark World dungeons.
The A Link to the Past wrong warp is one of the most consequential single discoveries in speedrunning history. By entering a staircase in the Tower of Hera at a precise sub-pixel position while transitioning between floors, the game reads an incorrect memory pointer for the destination room and places Link in Agahnim's Throne Room — the final room of the Light World. Completing the fight there then warps Link to Ganon's Tower in the Dark World, bypassing every Dark World dungeon, every Crystal rescue, and the entire Dark World map. The trick halved competitive finishing times overnight and remains the defining technique in the Any% category. The exact mechanism relies on how the SNES handles two-story transitions: the game briefly frees a staircase pointer, and if movement inputs are correct, a wrong pointer is latched. Precise sub-pixel position must be established before the staircase, making the setup highly consistent at the cost of demanding pixel-perfect positioning in the preceding room.
The Tower of Hera occupies two floors connected by staircases. When Link steps onto a staircase tile, the game queues a room destination address for the floor transition animation. The wrong warp exploits a brief window during which this destination pointer is in a state the engine was not designed to protect against lateral overwriting.
By establishing a specific sub-pixel X-position before entering the staircase room and walking into the tile at frame-perfect timing, the queued destination resolves to a memory address that corresponds to Agahnim's Throne Room rather than the intended upper floor. The game processes the transition normally, plays the staircase animation, and deposits Link in the wrong location without any visual glitch to warn the player that something unusual has occurred.
The setup is highly consistent once the sub-pixel position is understood: runners establish it by using a wall-collision alignment technique in the preceding corridor, making what sounds like a frame-perfect trick executable on demand at the highest competitive level.
When the wrong warp was first documented and shared in early speedrunning communities around 2002, it was not immediately clear that it was possible to execute consistently rather than once in thousands of attempts. Early demonstrations were treated with scepticism until multiple runners reproduced it in relatively short practice sessions. Within a year it had been integrated into the main Any% route and all competitive records were reset against the new standard.
The discovery also permanently bifurcated the A Link to the Past community. Any% with the wrong warp became the marquee category for maximum-skip competition. Any% No Major Glitches and 100% categories grew in parallel for players who wanted to see the full game. This pattern — a major skip technique splitting a community into glitch-embracing and glitch-avoiding branches — became a template repeated across dozens of subsequent games.