Two Decades On, Zelda Fans Continue to Discover New Glitches in Wind Waker

Believe it or not, you can complete The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker in under 30 minutes. This incredible feat is made possible by a complex new speedrunning technique that was demonstrated at this year’s Awesome Games Done Quick event. It involves some rapid swimming, clever camera work, and a hefty dose of number crunching.

For speedrunners, Wind Waker is a goldmine of exploits. The game is packed with legendary skips that can cut hours off the playtime, including a method to bypass an invisible barrier around Hyrule Castle. These tricks have been highlighted in past speedrunning showcases, such as last January when the game was completed in just under an hour. This year, runner EJ125 managed to slash that time down to just over 28 minutes.

How is this even possible? You really need to see it to believe it, but be prepared to feel a bit bewildered.

The run kicks off with a glitch that allows players to supercharge Link’s swimming speed, enabling him to leave the starting area of Outset Island and acquire the Wind Waker early. From there, EJ125 swims to Windfall Island to visit Tingle and grab the Picto Box, which is essentially an in-game camera. Things get incredibly intricate from this point onward.

In simple terms, the new trick utilizes the Picto Box to manipulate the game’s memory, allowing Link to teleport directly to the game’s conclusion from Outset Island. To pull this off, players must take a pixel-perfect photo of a bush. This photo holds a specific value that, through a series of complex steps, enables players to create a code payload sent to a second controller. This rewrites the player’s screen data, allowing them to warp to the ending after passing through a door. It’s like programming the game from the inside out.

EJ125 also showcased additional ways to exploit Wind Waker in a bonus segment using the Arbitrary Code Execution technique. He accessed the game’s debug menu and explored test areas that exist in a specific version of the game. The most mind-blowing moment was when he took a photo of the audience at AGDQ and inserted it into the game. You really have to see it to grasp the full impact.

This year’s Awesome Games Done Quick event raised over $2.44 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. You can catch videos of all the featured runs on a popular video platform.