Who finds the Glitches used in Speedruns?

[Music] who finds these glitches this is a commonly asked question from those who watch speedruns for the first time when you watch a speedrun having only experienced a game casually it might seem strange that someone out there had decided to try an extremely specific combination of inputs that results in something crazy happening for every trick you see in a speedrun there's a person behind the discovery an entire speedrun route especially for highly optimized games such as ocarina of time or super mario 64 is often dependent on years of discoveries from dozens of glitch hunters the glitch hunters are the ones who stretch a game's limits to find what's possible and while the work of every glitch hunter is important and often goes overlooked there are some glitch hunters who definitely stand out from the normal crowd if you've watched an ocarina of time or majora's mask speedrun within the past year you've probably witnessed a glitch that was derived from a discovery made by british glitch hunter glitches and stuff glitches and stuff has been discovering glitches for over a decade in that time he has discovered over 100 individual glitches techniques or general strategies across 12 different games with his main focus being ocarina of time and majora's mask for the n64 now most of what any glitch hunter finds is likely not going to be useful many documented findings are never used in speed runs but can help us understand a game better glitches and stuff is responsible for many important glitches or general strategies within the zelda franchise such as bit warping in skyward sword and double storage in the wind waker but his most iconic discovery came in october of 2019 when he was messing around with the boomerang in ocarina of time on october 10th 2019 glitches and stuff was messing around as child link in ocarina of time's forest temple during his research he wondered what might happen if link used the boomerang to collect a sculptura token but then exited and re-entered the room the sculpture token was in before the boomerang came back to him the boomerang always pauses between door transitions in ocarina of time and the objects loaded in the previous room unload once the room transition is complete but if the boomerang is still active while the objects unload what happens to the token it's carrying glitches and stuff got his answer when he re-entered the main lobby and there was a door floating where the boomerang last was when the boomerang picks up an object in ocarina of time it stores what's known as a reference to the attached object this reference is the location of the object within the game's memory and the boomerang will use this to help change the object's position so that it lines up with the boomerang while it flies back to link when exiting the room with the boomerang still active the game unloads the sculptura token attached to the boomerang but the boomerang still keeps the reference it originally made to the token not knowing that the token isn't there anymore and that the reference is old and stale when re-entering the main room the game will load back all the necessary actors into memory but it likely won't load them all to the exact same memory locations as before this time it happened to load a door at the memory location that the boomerang has a stale reference to meaning that the boomerang will now manipulate the door's position as if it's the object being carried thus the trick is called stale reference manipulation or srm of course all this wasn't immediately obvious to the ocarina of time glitch hunters and this wasn't the first time that something like this had been documented the earliest instance of srm actually dates back to 2007 but by 2019 there had been significant advancements in the tools that could be used to help understand how glitches work the most important tool being a live memory viewer as watching the game's memory change in real time provides invaluable information as to what's happening internally using these tools the ocarina of time glitch hunters immediately got to work figuring out what happened and what else might be possible with this technique after a week of non-stop team research glitches and stuff debuted a staggering new application of srm the ability to change what item is inside a treasure chest [Music] with the immense complexity of srm also came immense possibilities and the next year of glitch hunting provided no shortage of new discoveries srm became capable of editing link's inventory warping link to any location and even being a gateway to the most powerful glitch a video game can have arbitrary code execution with this immense power though it's important to note that srm is not an easy glitch to perform successfully executing an instance of srm typically involves setting up the game's memory in a very specific way using precise movement setups and requiring link's facing angle to be perfect failing a setup will often lead to the game crashing and ending a run the difficulty precision and understanding of what's happening internally is the reason it took over 20 years to discover srm after the release of the game and even though glitches and stuff wasn't technically the first person to perform the technique his discoveries in the forest temple and of editing chest contents ultimately sparked the beginning of the srm revolution in ocarina of time this revolution saved enormous amounts of time in every category that allowed srm and changed the way speedrunners view the game of course not all discoveries end up requiring years of research and testing to figure out some major glitches just appear out of nowhere like what happened to glitch hunter gertano 1 in the wind waker hd in late june of 2016 gertana decided that he wanted to play the legend of zelda the wind waker hd wind waker hd is a wii u game but gertana wanted to play it with a gamecube controller instead since the game doesn't have native gamecube controller support gertana had to use a homebrew program to help make it work one of the quality of life improvements that wind waker hd has over the original is the ability to walk around while in first person when holding out items naturally gortana made use of this improvement while he was playing however sometimes when gertana pulled out a first person item he would begin sliding forward with more speed than normal despite the fact that his control stick was in the neutral position confused as to what was happening gertana contacted another wind waker hd speedrunner suslord to try and figure out what was going on the result was bigger than either of them could have expected all right so the plan is like that that's what we're doing dude this is huge no this is scary no this game is dead this game is [ __ ] dead now it's over it's over it turns out that the ability to move while aiming with first person items can be exploited to build up speed at an exponential rate a glitch now known as item sliding this works by moving in a direction with any first person item then immediately repositioning the control stick to be just outside of the dead zone in the opposite direction link's speed will then begin to exponentially climb with a 20 increase every single frame what happened with cortana was that the homebrew program he used didn't map the control stick correctly causing the neutral position of the gamecube controller to be interpreted as holding slightly downward so when gertano would move forward with a first person item and then let go of the control stick it would snap into the perfect position to cause an item slide before item sliding wind waker hd was a speed run that didn't feature very many glitches so once item sliding joined the fray the run times began to plummet but even with the ability to slide around at high speeds wind waker hd was still a three and a half hour long speed run the game still had one major roadblock left that gertano was eyeing the barrier around hyrule castle which prevents players from accessing ganon's tower early if it was somehow possible to get on the other side of this one wall then the game would drop to a 90 minute speed run almost immediately and considering the fact that there was now a glitch which easily allowed runners to reach ridiculously high speed values i'm sure you can guess what eventually [Music] happened oh my god oh my [ __ ] god oh my god oh my god [Music] it turns out that the collision polygons of the barrier don't quite come together in the center of the bridge with an extremely precise facing angle and a fast enough movement speed gertana successfully managed to get a recording of clipping through the barrier on april 10th 2017. this massive sequence break now allowed for runs to skip completing every single dungeon as well as the long triforce quest at the end of the game thanks to the efforts of gertana and the rest of the community wind waker hd transformed into a speedrun full of sequence breaks and insanely fun high-speed movement and it all started because of a faulty homebrew program homebrew aside though glitch hunters have been finding big glitches before the modern tools of today many older games have had active communities for well over a decade and different people have come and gone as the years pass by but some influence a game well beyond their stay if at any point you've watched an ocarina of time speedrun that was done after the year 2008 you've almost certainly seen a glitch that was discovered by finnish glitch hunter kazooie kazooie began glitch hunting ocarina of time all the way back in 2005 and is responsible for many of the game's earliest sequence breaks and major glitches gerudo fortress's child and shadow temple early were two of kazooie's earliest finds they were key discoveries that allowed runners to begin skipping the forest fire and water temples almost 15 years ago and brought down the game's time by about two hours when they were used kazooie is also responsible for finding other major glitches that would be used later in the game's history such as bottle adventure and early explosives as powerful as these glitches are none of them would even get close to a video that kazooie uploaded on march 27 2008 showcasing a massive new sequence break that's still used in many categories today known as door of time skip [Music] the door of time normally stops link from obtaining the master sword before he's supposed to in a normal playthrough link has to obtain the three spiritual stones from the game's three child dungeons as well as pick up the ocarina of time and the song of time before the door of time will let him travel through time so being able to bypass it saves a lot of time but if you stand in the proper position on the left side of the door you can actually see past it to the other side the door of time doesn't quite stretch to the left wall and this is where the exploit begins to get the skip to work kazooie used a combination of two techniques that he'd previously seen a side hop out of bounds clip by samuth and twisted side hopping by yautja by using a precise twisted side hop instead of a regular one kazooie could clip out of bounds on the left side of the door while still facing inwards towards the hallway with this facing angle he could make link jump slash and redirect his momentum to go forward and land back in bounds to get past the door a simple combination that results in a massive break the door of time skip continues to be an integral part of ocarina of time speed running even some current routes which use srm to warp around everywhere still make use of it for getting to the master sword and it's hard to imagine what the game's runs would be like without door of time skip or any of the other glitches that kazooie contributed to ocarina of time except i forgot one thing kazooie wasn't the first person to perform door of time skip that credit goes to a glitch hunter named mijitsu mijitsu had performed the glitch a few days beforehand but hadn't published a video on it and had used tools that allowed him to slow down the game and help demonstrate that the glitch was possible whereas kazooie performed the skip in real time after hours of trying to make it work they each discovered the same glitch independent of each other so the credit for discovering door of time skip goes to both of them then well in a way it's more than that without the side hop clip from samuth or the twisted side hop from yautja the skip wouldn't be possible the way we know it and that's not true for just door of time skip when item sliding was found in wind waker hd it took the effort of not just gertana and suslord but the entire community at the time with people like chastifer lee sva the mirror shield and lincol scurro to help test everything that was possible as well as dragonbane for creating the input viewer application that cortana would use to eventually find barrier skip srm in both ocarina of time and majora's mask wouldn't be where it is today without the interest from glitches and stuff along with the community's wide array of dedicated glitch hunters like fig blinny save state dany v exodus mr cheese and full-grown gaming just to name a few and all of these people are just the ones that i as a 3d zelda speedrunner know about this group doesn't come close to representing the scope of the entire speedrunning community i'm sure that if you're a runner watching this video who's been around for a long time you can easily think of names that i haven't mentioned and probably never heard of who deserve more recognition for what they do every glitch or technique you see in a speedrun and the knowledge of these games that we have is built on the foundation laid out by the glitch hunters that came before us and the glitch hunters who still help document and research games today sharing ideas and inspiring others to think about these games as entirely separate worlds with their own rules and science is what makes glitch hunters amazing so if you've ever done glitch hunting or helped contribute to a speedrun in any way thank you your time and effort spent doing so is invaluable to our community whether we realize it or not i'm gymnast 86 with lowest percent and thank you for watching you

Channel: Lowest Percent

Views: 741,327

Keywords:

Id: PTsnblKvfqE

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/lrflew]

As someone who is more interested in speedrunning meta (routing, glitch hunting, even leaderboard moderating, etc.), I've felt like it's a bit underappreciated in the wider community, and worse it makes it hard for people who are interested in it to actually get involved.

If you want to glitch hunt a game with a large community, like a Mario or Zelda game, then you may be able to get involved in the glitch hunting scene through the general speedrunning communities for the games, but usually things like speedrunning community Discord servers are more focused on getting people into running the game than getting glitch hunters together. (At least from what I've seen. Each server will be different, and I'm sure there are examples out there contradicting this. I'm just saying what I've seen in general).

It's even worse if you want to get involved with a smaller, lesser-known game that doesn't have any (or much) of a technical community. I've been glitch hunting for a game off-and-on for a few years that I'm really happy with my results on. I'm happy with what I've been able to achieve so far (skipping 3 out of the 4 longest levels so far), but I've had to do it all alone and mostly blind to the methodology that others have and do use for this kind of thing. I've wanted to try and get others involved to help me route and glitch hunt the game (and even speedrun it), but I've been unsuccessful so far, and I've been alone on the leaderboard all these years.

Videos like this I think help, at least in some part. Bringing attention to the people behind these sorts of discoveries brings wider attention to the kind of work being done. And naming people who are actively working on the Zelda meta is certainly really helpful for anybody wanting to get into that specific game's technical scene. However, I still think there needs to be more done to make it easier for people who want to do this kind of work to find each other and collaborate, especially when it comes to speedrun games that don't have hundreds of runners.

[u/YourEverydaySR]

The ending of that video gave me goosebumps

[u/Kaaaahl]

The God, ZFG

[u/migrations_]

Glitch hunting is a very specific skill done by people that usually have good analytical / mathematical minds, good gaming skills and a lot of patience.
I first heard about glitch hunting a really long time ago when I was looking into game testing. Essentially a game tester is a glitch hunter and over time you start seeing patterns in games and how they work and how to break the game.
I actually did a skype interview like 6 years ago with a Super Mario 64 glitch hunter who could clone goombas in 64 ( pannenkoek2012 ) and use it to do crazy stuff. I talked to him all about it and asked him if he tried it on Mario 64 DS and stuff and he said that no, all he did was play Mario 64. And he tried all sorts of different things over and over and over and over until he figures something out and how to repeat it.
The analytical and mathematical part come in when the glitch hunter can kind of reverse engineer why the glitch is happening and figure out why it happens and repeat it over and over.
Super fascinating.

This type of player exists in fighting games too and these are usually the people that figure out crazy combos such as ( desk) on youtube.

[u/Neuroentropic_Force]

Damn, beautiful, informative, inspiring video. Brings a tear to this gamer's eye. Glitch Hunters are like the crews for Broadway plays, they do incredible work behind the scenes. Routers too, they write the scripts!

[u/ChezMere]

As always, Gymnast being a fantastic contributor to positive feedback loops in speedrunning.

[u/[deleted]]

Engineers.

[u/Bhazor]

Didn't expect emotions in my meta Speedrun video.

[u/coolpapa2282]

I can tell this isn't about alttp because the top comment isn't "Yuzuhara".