Over the past few months, the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker speedrunning community has been honing a new discovery that has already managed to cut the standing any% world record in half – and then some. The problem, as with Ocarina of Time beforehand, is that this technique changes the run so completely that the community is essentially having to write a whole new rulebook for it.
The new discovery allows for arbitrary code execution, or ACE, which essentially allows players to manipulate the game's code while it's running in order to warp directly to the end credits. A similar glitch broke Ocarina of Time wide open a few years ago, and that game is now split between numerous categories – ACE glitches change the act of speedrunning so dramatically that many players prefer to stick to running with less profoundly broken techniques.
If you want to see the new Wind Waker glitch in action, this 17:34 run from minimini352 is a good place to start. He begins the run by using long-standing Wind Waker speedrun tech to reach Windfall Island early and get the Picto Box. He then completes an arcane set of movements to take three specific pictographs of a bush, saves and reloads to return to Outset Island, does another magic dance on the beach, and walks through a nearby door to warp directly to the end credits.
So what's actually going on here? It starts by setting up the second, third, and fourth controllers with extremely specific inputs, and then doing a "text stacking glitch with the Picto Box," as minimini352 explains in the video. "You get two texts on the screen at the same time and you close them in the right way. If you do it properly, you can get a crash where the game basically is reading some pictograph data and tries to read it as an address. Most of the time that crashes.
"But we take a very specific picture so that the exact pixels in that area of the picture creates an address. Then that address, we have that point to Link's position data, which is why I did that setup to get into that specific spot on the beach at the end. Then we make Link's position point to controller 2, 3, and 4. Before the run, we set up those inputs to be something specific which writes code to go to the credits. That's how it works. TL,DR: picture goes to position goes to controllers equals credits."
That 17:34 run is less than half as long as the standing any% world record of 43:49, set by iwabi74 just a few days ago. But you won't find the new run listed among the records on Wind Waker's Speedrun.com page, because it's not actually legal by the community's current standards. The question now being debated in the Wind Waker Speedrunning Discord is what the rules for ACE runs should look like.
If you want the full technical details on how the glitch works, ZeldaSpeedRuns has a full breakdown, but one of the key details here is setting the controller inputs. This requires you to set extremely specific positions on the sticks and triggers, which is effectively impossible without a modded input viewer, something that's currently banned during runs. But should it be allowed before a run, to set up the ACE technique? Furthermore, should manipulating the game's memory before the run be allowed at all?
minimini352's run also used a modified GameCube controller. Specifically, the springs were removed from the L and R triggers to make the input setups easier. Should that kind of modification be legal for speedruns?
Then there's perhaps the most obvious question of all: Does simply warping to the end credits count as beating the game? It certainly does in Ocarina of Time, where ACE warps have become the dominant technique for any% runs, but each speedrunning community sets its own rules, and Wind Waker runners now have to decide what its rules are going to look like moving forward. Just don't be surprised if you suddenly start seeing a whole lot of headlines about new Wind Waker speedrun records in the near future.
Wind Waker still tops our list of the best GameCube games, but our number two pick will shock you – OK, no, it's probably exactly what you expect it to be, but come on, it's always a great time to go stare at a list of excellent GameCube titles.
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