Zelda Can Be Beaten In Four Minutes With This Glitch
According to a new YouTube video from user MagicScrumpy, it’s possible to beat The Legend of Zelda in four minutes. This may be one of the most in-depth explanations of a glitch I’ve ever heard. You are told exactly what happens in specific terms, and it takes eleven minutes to explain in full. It’s okay if some of it goes over your head.
Basically, the simple summary is this: only eleven sprites are allowed onscreen at any given time during the game. To activate the glitch in the first place you must first be on a screen with eleven sprites, and the easiest one to reach from the beginning is a graveyard screen with ten gravestones. Touching all of them will make ten ghosts appear, so Link makes eleven.
Then you must use the magic flute. Something about the way the flute works causes the game to attempt to load one more sprite. But there’s no space for it, so it pushes the data packet further into the game until it finds an open space to stop in. You can make this space teleport you to the end of the game by manipulating the data in precisely the right way.
There are a lot of crazy little things that have to be just right in order to instruct the glitch to warp you to Zelda’s room. Each save file has to be named specific characters, you must start on the Second Quest, and the overworld music must hit a specific note. Also, the bug only works on the Famicom, so barely any of us Yanks or Brits can try it. In short: this wasn’t going to be discovered until modern technology let people completely dismantle the code.
That’s the basic idea. For the full specifics, watch the video.