10 Impossible Video Games Utterly Destroyed By Speedrunners

'Speedrunning' is the term used to describe the community of passionate gamers that make use of everything ranging from level memorisation to game-breaking glitches to get from the opening credits to the closing cinematics in as little time as possible.

Some games are tougher to beat than others. In most instances, this is down to how hard developers decide to slide the scales in the game's favour.

Certain titles have garnered infamous reputations for hard-hitting bosses or level designs that encourage trial-and-error tactics by having players die over and over.

It feeds into the eternal debate gamers have around whether finally overcoming a challenging chapter in a game is more rewarding than just breezing all the way to the finish line or not.

In the case of the speedrunning community, the consensus is very much in the latter camp.

And, no matter how difficult the rest of us find certain games, no title in the industry is safe from a runner discovering a game-breaking sequence they can use to save a few seconds on the timer.

A legendary title in every sense, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is still one of the first video games people think of when it comes to speedrunners. Regularly performed on the stage at GDQ, it has been one of the games that speedrunners have plugged away at for the longest; the various glitches and sequence breaks make it a challenging, but immensely rewarding, title for those that can perform these things correctly.

With that being said, the first few years of running Ocarina of Time still required several hours to complete, with the sheer amount of mandatory dungeons required with a playthrough.

But, if there's a game-breaking way around things like these, the speedrunning community is going to find it.

The Door of Time Skip was arguably the most consequential glitch discovered for the game, allowing players to effectively skip past all of the Child Link dungeons on a run. Everything from the language of the game to the system it's running on can also have some profound impacts on how much time is saved during a run.

The average player will usually complete Ocarina of Time within 24-38 hours, whilst American runner Murph_E currently holds the world record for an Any% run with their incredible 3:54.566 on the Japanese Wii Virtual Console in October 2022.