The event has helped to skyrocket speedruns into well documented internet ubiquity. At GDQ, there were live any% speedruns, multiplayer races, and blindfolded runs. There are any number of categories for any number of games: ‘any%’ challenges the player to finish the game doing whatever they can, and it is the most popular category on the speedrunning scene today. Speedrunning, as its name might suggest, is the practice of playing a game to its authored conclusion as speedily as possible, and often by any means necessary. Twice a year at the charity event Games Done Quick (helpfully preceded by ‘Awesome’ in winter and ‘Summer’ in summer to mark the seasons), hundreds of thousands of people now gather around computer screens and in conference halls to watch speedrunners blitz through beloved games under an hour, half an hour, twenty minutes. My recollections of these iD Software titles – lacking in plot, but rich in colour – seem to hold up fine against the test of time. I’d stare at the box art for the game, as punchy and pulpy as any Johanna Lindsey novel on my mother’s bookshelf. Wolfenstein 3D was a collection of inputs and responses: collecting turkey dinners and gliding through cyan doors. It wasn’t a game to win in the traditional sense of the word. I remember shooting Nazis in the face, I remember William Joseph ‘B.J.’ Blazkowicz’s eyes and jaw moving back and forth in the HUD, and the way his face got bloodied as his health trickled down to zero. I’m not going to pretend I remember the specs of her computer, or even exactly what year it was. My memories of gaming in my early childhood are always accompanied by the sound of a whirring fan. The fan would turn its head disapprovingly back and forth as I logged on to play videogames during summer break. More importantly, her office housed a modem, and the small mechanical fan next to her desk was always on to keep her computer setup cool in those damp, muggy, Virginia summers. There was Minesweeper of course, which I never got the hang of, and Solitaire, which I managed to beat once or twice before the age of 10. There was also Billy the Kid up there, and Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter. It was an otherwise cramped room: stacked with papers and behavioural therapy workbooks from her private practice, all nestled next to romance novels and the DSM-IV. My mother’s big beige block PC in her upstairs office had it installed. Here are the five fastest Breath of the Wild Any% speedruns.Of all the iD Software games from the early ’90s, I only hazily remember Wolfenstein 3D at best. To make it more specific, we’ll only look at “Any%” world records, meaning that players are able to use any glitch at their disposal to beat the game from start to finish, without needing to complete any of the tasks that you would for some of the other run categories (like All Dungeons, All Main Quests, 100%, etc.). This list will round up the top Breath of the Wild speedruns as of spring 2023, but we will occasionally update it as new runs emerge. A tool like a bomb isn’t used to blow up walls and enemies, but to soar across the entirety of Hyrule with a flick of Link’s wrist.īecause of new discoveries and people improving their craft, speedrunning in Breath of the Wild is constantly changing. Its walls are made of code, not stone, and as a result, the best players can simply glitch their way through to expose a vast interior space filled with absolutely nothing. By watching them play, we can see that Hyrule Castle isn’t some impregnable fortress. It’s that they change how we see the world of the game itself. What makes the top runs entertaining isn’t just that these players flex technical prowess, although it is always fun to watch someone good enough at fighting to beat the final boss in Link’s underwear. Join us on our journey through The Legend of Zelda series, from the original 1986 game to the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and beyond. In 2023, Polygon is embarking on a Zeldathon.
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