The Gold Split - Week #5: Link goes even faster
Week #5 (August 1st): New routes for Zelda games; Mario Kart DS History; Quick & Crash leaderboards; ESA Hiatus; Marathon News; New World Records: Refunct, Super Mario Sunshine, Titanfall 2
Good day!
I’m happy to hear last week’s ULTRAKILL story was received well. I have one follow-up: my friend Frozer was telling me that the “The Wait of the World” Update included an ULTRATOUGH level, and reaching it was similarly difficult. The hypothesis is that many players became better at the game at that time in order to complete that content, which in turn caused many of them to also consider speedruns and submitting their times to the leaderboards. It’s still a hypothesis, but a very plausible one!
On a personal note, I will be on holiday in Denmark next week! I still plan to publish, but it will be a much lighter edition and probably won’t feature a story of the week. Perhaps I’ll expand that week’s top times to compensate Until then!
Contents
Up to Speed ⚡️
I’d like to cover much more, but many great stories stay confined to the communities for a specific game or series and rarely get out. I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should cover, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨
Story of the Week
This week we’re talking about the absolute fastest humanly possible ways to complete The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as well as Majora’s Mask, as their Any% routes have received their first updates since 2021.
These games were released on many different consoles in many different regions and there are differences in each of these versions. The question of the fastest way to complete these games is also always a question of which is the fastest version.
But it’s rarely that simple. One version could have the lowest amount of lag and run the fastest, but a specific technique or glitch might not work on it.
Anything I’m talking about is a gross oversimplification, but before we dive deeper, we need to get a few important terms related to these games out of the way:
Stale Reference Manipulation (SRM)
SRM was discovered in 2019 and is a way of manipulating data that is being written to the game’s memory. Certain actions like holding something as Link or catching something with the boomerang connect them in the game’s memory to what has been picked up. Data is being copied continuously from one to the other. By unloading and loading things in a certain way, it’s possible to keep that connection, but now the data is being written somewhere else. This allows players to carefully manipulate the memory, potentially moving items, triggering events early, or even executing new code.
Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE)
This could probably fill a thesis, but the tl;dr is: by carefully setting up SRM, it’s possible to add new custom code to the game’s memory just with regular controller inputs and/or the name of the save file. This can have almost any desired effect but is most notably used in Any% to skip straight to the end of the game. For the most impressive display of what ACE can do, look no further than TASBot’s showcase at SGDQ 2022, put together by Sauraen, Savestate, dwangoAC and countless members of the community:
Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask had very different recent developments, so let’s look at them separately:
Since July 2021, the Any% route in Ocarina of Time has involved setting up SRM as fast as possible and then triggering the credits. The current best time is 3 minutes and 47 seconds, and it’s difficult to see how it could be any faster.
However, it requires the technically inferior Wii version, exploiting a necessary hardware bug. While the WiiU version would be a few seconds faster due to having less lag, the glitches used don’t work the same way.
That was the case until very recently, when MrCheeze with the help of bradyONE found a way to trigger the credits on the WiiU. This is technically faster by a few seconds, but harder to achieve and uses a technique which is currently not allowed on the leaderboards. Whether that will change and whether we’ll see any new best times set on the WiiU remains to be seen.
Majora’s Mask’s Any% (Unrestricted) category, on the other hand, received a much more substantial upgrade. Between August 2020 and November 2021 that route was played on the Japanese version on the N64 and used a warp to the credits using SRM and then ACE, but it couldn’t be done within the first cycle because it wasn’t possible to become human.
In November of 2021 a way to do just that was found. The downside: it required the US version of the game on the Wii. Both of these made a warp to the credits using ACE impossible and required a different kind of SRM to instead warp to the final boss, but it was still faster.
Until just recently when once again MrCheeze came up with a way to combe a technique found by Exodus, viable on N64, with a new ACE method to create the best of both worlds: a warp to the credits within the first cycle of the game. This route improvement saves a significant amount of time and already resulted in a new record just yesterday by JTown2909, finishing Majora’s Mask in just 17 minutes and 21 seconds. There’s more optimisation to be done and it’s likely that we’ll soon see the game completed in under 17 minutes.
There are lots of details that I can’t go into here because of the limited length, but for a much more complete write-up, check out MrCheeze’s post. It was both the way I heard about this as well as a large source of my information on the topic and I can’t give enough credit.
Up to Speed
🚗 The History of the Mario Kart DS World Champion (1 hour video)
Everybody’s favourite world record historian, SummoningSalt, published a new video essay about the history of the Mario Kart DS World Champion, all the way from the release of the game until today. It’s a title that belongs not to the person with the most records across all 32 tracks but to the person who performs best on average across all of them. It’s a great watch with cool storylines and plenty of detail. Check it out!
🗓️ ESA is taking a break and cancelled the two upcoming events (15 minute video)
ESA (the largest speedrunning event in Europe, not the space agency) is taking a break and has cancelled their planned ESA Legends 24 (November 2024) and ESA Winter 25 (February 2025) events. No word yet on ESA Summer 25, possibly in July 2025, as the team wants to take a deep breath before coming back to event planning.
✅ Quick & Crash leaderboards now require verification at the top (2 minute read)
The Quick & Crash leaderboards have experienced a shake-up at the top. It’s an arcade game in which you shoot a light gun at a shooting range. After reports about faulty or overly generous machines, new runs breaking into the Top 5 will now require a video of the entire run to be verified. The rest of the leaderboard will remain unmoderated, ensuring easy access for casual players.
📖 “Speedrun” added to the Cambridge English Dictionary (2 minute read)
Along with other terms that define our generation like “boop” or “chef’s kiss”, “speedrun” was finally added to the Cambridge English Dictionary. However, the entry legitimises the use of the space, forming the abominable “speed run”. Several other dictionaries already included the term, so we can collectively ignore this and move on to the next section. ⏬
Marathon News
Finished:
ESA Summer 2024 raised $57,000+ for Alzheimerfonden
Lady Arcaders Super Showcase 2024 raised $6,000+ for CARE
Running:
Until 05 August 2024: Summer SM64 ROM Hacks Marathon 2024 (Schedule)
Upcoming:
Starts 02 August 2024: Gamers Against Suicide, raising money for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (Schedule)
Starts 02 August 2024: Pokemon Speedruns Marathon 2024 (Schedule)
Starts 02 August 2024: Running 4 Reels 2024, raising money for the Reel Hope Project (Schedule)
This Week’s Top Times
🥇 First Place:
Refunct (Any%: Normal) in 00:02:40.889 by smythe (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSuper Mario Sunshine (Any%: GCN) in 01:12:51.000 by inkstar
Video • Twitch • YouTubeTitanfall 2 (Any%: Standard) in 01:13:22.000 by Dadadu (He/Him)
Video • TwitchSuper Mario Bros. Wonder (All Royal Seeds) in 02:05:50.000 by ZimPractical
Video • Twitch • YouTubeClustertruck (Any%) in 00:11:02.033 by EmilySailor (She/Her)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeThe Lion King (SNES) (Any% Easy) in 00:11:52.000 by Bronkel (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeAmnesia: The Dark Descent (Any%: Quitouts) in 00:19:50.000 by Quazzar (He/Him)
Video • YouTubeThe Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (Any%: Unrestricted) in 00:17:21.000 by JTown2909
Video • YouTubePokémon Legends: Arceus (Any%: ENG) in 03:36:40.000 by halqery (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥈 Second Place:
Super Meat Boy (Any%) in 00:17:27.549 by DrZytho
Video • TwitchMetroid Fusion (Any%: Normal) in 01:11:16.000 by monkeysmb (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeResident Evil 4 (Steam) (New Game: Professional, Single Segment, 60 FPS) in 01:19:20.439 by Sawken
Video • Twitch • YouTubePrey (2017) (Any%) in 00:05:35.000 by scufu (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Main Quest: PC) in 00:23:03.430 by DankSlushie (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeGimmick! (Any% (Zipless)) in 00:06:53.000 by Aryll (She/Her)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥉 Third Place:
Grand Theft Auto V (Segments: Trevor%) in 00:54:38.000 by szau (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSonic Adventure 2: Battle (Hero Story: New Game) in 00:21:44.220 by Flubbler (He/Him, They/Them)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeDeltarune (Chapter 2: Main Route, Glitched) in 00:26:11.000 by CrystalSRL (She/Her, They/Them)
VideoDishonored 2 (Any%: Emily) in 00:20:52.000 by Wampirchik (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeStar Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (Any% no Stablaunch) in 00:22:17.000 by l1f3l6sS
Video
Fun Stat of the Week
📊 The oldest game on speedrun.com is Computer Space. It was released more than 52 years ago, which allegedly makes it older than the activities of baking and reading...
Reddit Choice
🔝 The r/speedrun choice of the week is this fruitful discussion about whether a competition offering prize money is enough to make a game popular among the speedrunning community.
My take: it’s enough to put it on the map. But whether the game continues to have a healthy community after the competition depends on many other factors.
👋🏻 And that’s it for this week! See you next Thursday, August 8th 2024. 👋🏻
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Special shoutout to my incredible wife and co-conspirator Niamh for all the visuals. Let her know how awesome those dividers are!
Special shoutout to Sarim for supporting with some copywriting. Find the words he writes over at gameluster.com!