The beauty of modern video gaming is all the many layers of fun players can make for themselves. You have the intrinsic joy of playing the game as intended. That is, after all, what the devs toiled over for sleepless nights on end. Next is the goofy fun of finding unintended styles of play that nevertheless work out in your favor. Then there are the people who are so godlike they manage to break the game the day it comes out. Yes, someone has already beaten Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, by most estimations a 70-80 hour game, in just over 90 minutes.
We saw this first at VideoGamesChronicle. The gamer gymnast86 posted their playthrough of the newest open-world Zelda game mere hours after release. In just that time, they already found a speedrun path to completion. They did not use an amiibo for this playthrough, either. The gamer notes that many of the glitches present in Breath of the Wild are not in Tears of the Kingdom. Those glitches helped speedrunners decimate that massive game in a matter of minutes. So while 94 minutes seems incredibly fast, especially in the first 24 hours, gymnast86 hastens to add this number will only go down.
We won’t embed the video, because it is inherently a spoiler, so we’ll just link to it (ha) here. 94-Minute Tears of the Kingdom day one speedrun.
The speedrunning community has come to the fore in the past decade-plus. People spend hundreds of hours practicing with games to get the runtime of any individual playthrough as low as it can get. It never ceases to amaze me. Any little misfire can end a run in failure. We should note, it is, like Breath of the Wild, possible to go straight to the final boss in Tears of the Kingdom. You can do it; just most people will die from under-leveling. But if someone can beat it in 94 minutes on day one, just think of how fast it’ll be next month.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
