Nearly five years ago, well-known speedrunner Narcissa Wright completed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time  in an extremely impressive 18 minutes and 10 seconds, a time that some felt was, perhaps, close to the fastest time possible. However, the community continued to put their efforts towards discovering Ocarina of Time  glitches and optimizing the run, and now a major milestone has been reached in the world of OoT speedrunning: the game has been finished in under 17 minutes.

The sub-17 minute The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time  run occurred on July 12, 2019 at the hands of Norwegian speedrunner Torje Amundsen. Falling into the OoT Any% category, which tasks players with completing the game as quickly as possible without any limitations on the glitches that they can use, Amundsen's world record-setting run clocks in at 16 minutes and 58 seconds, a three second improvement on the speedrunner's 17 minute and 1 second run from earlier this year.

"This may be the very last minute milestone Ocarina of Time  Any% will see," Amundsen writes in his commentary on the run. Indeed, it has been four years since the first sub-18 minute OoT  speedrun, a run that was performed by Swedish speedrunner Jodenstone, and, without the discovery of another major Ocarina of Time  glitch, it is hard to imagine how an additional minute could be shaved off of Amundsen's sub-17 minute run.

For those that are curious, the discovery of a complicated OoT glitch called "Get Item Manipulation" is part of what has allowed players to improve so dramatically on Narcissa Wright's Ocarina of Time run from 2014. At its most basic, "Get Item Manipulation" allows players to trick the game into giving them a bottle, which then gives them the ability to warp directly from the game's first dungeon to its final one. While this warp was part of Wright's run, the method for obtaining the bottle was different and more time consuming.

Despite Amundsen's indication that a sub-16 minute Any% run of Ocarina of Time  may not be possible, the speedrunner is not giving up on his efforts to optimize the run. As per his commentary, there are approximately 3.5 seconds of time saves to be found in his record-setting run, and fans may just get to see Ocarina of Time  beaten in 16 minutes and 55 seconds before long.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time released for the N64 in 1998.

Source: Kotaku, Speedrun.com