After 12 years, Zelda speedrunners just made Ocarina of Time's most popular strategy "obsolete" with a technique discovered by accident
Feb. 14, 2024Ganondoor, meet Ganonfloor
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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s most popular speedrunning route has been made “obsolete” after standing for 12 years, all thanks to an accidental discovery that shaves an entire minute off the world record.
As the video below highlights, last month the above technique - dubbed Ganondoor - was replaced with a new strategy: Ganonfloor. It still utilizes the Wrong Warp but now takes Link from Ocarina of Time’s second dungeon all the way to the end of the Collapse section. What’s more, the impressive skip was discovered mostly by accident and has been years in the making.
It wasn’t until this year that the implications of that video were discovered - repeated room duplications would mean ‘dynamic’ - or moving - polygons would corrupt data from the static geometry that made up the surfaces Link could move across. In the original video, that simply meant the geometry disappeared, but runner Natalyahasdied guessed that polygons could be corrupted in different ways, and that code from one polygon could be matched up to code from another polygon somewhere else in the game. In this case, Dodongo’s cavern, that early game dungeon, could feasibly stitch up to Ganon’s tower at the end of the game.
It took DannyB just three minutes to find that loading zone, and while it didn’t initially work thanks to the time of day, it wasn’t long before the speedrunning community had a route directly to Ganon that they could work to optimize. As the video above explains, the technique required is pretty intricate, but if you can pull it off, it shaves an easy 60 seconds off the previous best route.
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I wonder which of the otherbest Zelda gamesare hiding massive time-skips?
I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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