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.
