The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

N64 · Any% · 1998

Current WR

6:46

First Known Run

~2:00:00

Ocarina of Time Any% is the most technically complex N64 speedrun, using arbitrary code execution to skip to the credits from within the first dungeon in under seven minutes.

Ocarina of Time's speedrun history is a record of escalating glitch discovery. Early runs focused on sequence breaking through Bottle Adventure and wrong warps using the Prelude of Light song to teleport to the end credits. By 2012, runners had reduced the time from hours to roughly eighteen minutes. The watershed moment came with the discovery of arbitrary code execution via the bottle duplication glitch: by duplicating certain items into incorrect inventory slots, players can overwrite game memory and trigger the end credits without completing any dungeon. This pushed the world record below ten minutes and eventually into the six-minute range. Ocarina speedrunning defined the concept of "ACE" (arbitrary code execution) for a mainstream audience and spawned the practice of deep memory-manipulation analysis in the console speedrunning community.

Famous Techniques:

Wrong Warp — using the Prelude of Light song to incorrectly load the end credits room instead of the Temple of Time, bypassing all major content
Bottle Adventure — overwriting an item slot with a bottle via inventory manipulation to access wrong warps and out-of-bounds areas
Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE) — corrupting game memory through item duplication to directly execute credits-trigger code
Superslide — storing a sidehop momentum state and then sliding across the ground at high speed to skip past trigger zones

Notable Runners:

Cosmowright — dominant runner of the 2012–2014 era who held the world record and pioneered the sub-20-minute barrier before ACE was discovered
Jodenstone — modern record holder who optimised the ACE route to its current sub-7-minute expression
ZFG — community analyst and runner who documented memory layouts that made ACE routing possible and pushes the NMG category

Key Facts:

The world record has been cut from over two hours to under seven minutes through successive glitch discoveries across two decades
ACE was first demonstrated in Ocarina of Time before spreading as a technique to dozens of other games's speedrun communities
The "No Major Glitches" category remains separately competitive and requires around twenty-three minutes of optimised play
Version differences between the 1.0 and 1.2 cartridges affect which glitches are available, creating parallel version-specific categories