30-Minute Legend Of Zelda Speedrun is a New World Record

A Legend of Zelda player has beaten the game in a record-breaking 30 minutes and 29 seconds. The speedrun was completed by Darkwing_Duck_sda, just 8 seconds faster than his previous best of 30 minutes and 37 seconds.

Darkwing took advantage of a screen scrolling glitch to skip through the game at abnormal speed – according to the website How Long to Beat, an average Zelda playthrough takes approximately 10 hours.

This excerpt, from Speed Demos Archive, explains the glitch and how to take advantage of it:

To clip through a wall (screen scroll glitch), you must stand toward that wall and be a specific amount of pixels away from the wall (either 5 or 7, the amount escapes me at the moment) and then move one frame in a side direction. This will cause Link to turn around, but stay on the same pixel. Then you can move through the wall. You only get to move through a half step of solid wall, but that’s enough to clip through things that are set diagonally, or push you through the screen transition “wall.” Clipping through the edge of the screen sends you to the other side.

The question is, should speedruns using glitch exploits really be considered a true completion of a game?

Source: Kotaku