The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time · Nintendo 64 · Wrong Warp · Saves: Entire adult timeline (roughly 45–60 minutes) · Documented: 2012
A wrong warp using the Prelude of Light cutscene that sends child Link directly to the game's ending credits, bypassing all adult temples and the final Ganon confrontation.
Ocarina of Time's wrong warp exploits a loading zone conflict between the Prelude of Light warp song and the door transition out of the Temple of Time. After pulling the Master Sword from the Pedestal of Time as young Link, the game briefly holds both the Temple of Time's entrance loading zone and the Prelude's destination pointer in memory simultaneously. By activating the Prelude of Light at the precise moment that the door loading zone is triggered, the game attempts to execute both transitions in the same frame and resolves the conflict by sending the player to an incorrect destination — the credits sequence rather than the Temple of Time interior. The technique requires establishing a specific item configuration, a bomb drop, and the song trigger within a roughly four-frame window. When it works, the game cuts to the Ganon defeat credits as child Link, without ever visiting the Shadow Temple, the Spirit Temple, or the Gerudo Fortress, and without the adult age transformation that normal progression requires. The discovery of this wrong warp in 2012 reshaped the Any% category entirely and touched off years of refinement in the surrounding route.
Ocarina of Time handles warp songs by first registering a destination pointer when the song animation begins, then executing the teleport once the animation completes. Simultaneously, the game's room management watches for physical overlap with loading zone triggers — areas of geometry that initiate room transitions. When both systems try to fire in the same processing window, the engine must decide which destination to use, and the outcome depends on the exact order of operations in that frame.
In front of the Temple of Time, the Prelude of Light's destination and the door's loading zone overlap. A precisely timed Prelude activation while crossing the door threshold at specific sub-pixel coordinates forces the engine to resolve this conflict. The resolution — sending the player to a memory address adjacent to the Prelude's normal destination rather than the Prelude's actual destination — places them at the credits trigger. The game proceeds as if the defeat of Ganon has occurred, playing the full ending sequence without the player having visited a single adult dungeon.
Before the credits warp was found, OoT any% required completing the Forest Temple, the Fire Temple, the Water Temple, and often the Shadow Temple before the route could be optimised toward Ganon. Competitive times clustered around twenty to twenty-two minutes. The credits warp allowed runners to completely bypass all of this, reducing the effective game to its first thirty minutes of content before the wrong warp fires.
The years after 2012 saw intensive sub-optimisation of the early-game route: every chest, every cutscene, every room transition between file select and the Prelude activation was scrutinised for time saves. New skips — including the forest escape skip and the Deku Tree door skip — were layered in. The resulting route bears almost no resemblance to normal gameplay and is now one of the most technically demanding sequences in any N64 speedrun, demanding precise movement, sub-pixel positioning, and frame-accurate inputs across a sustained seven-minute window.