Let's break the Legend of Zelda!

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the original legend of zelda I decided to go back and play the super nintendo version Link to the Past. Along the way I found a guide that explores some of the glitches and exploits that can be performed and decided to show off a few of them. Let's get crackin!

GLITCHED SPEEDRUN
The first movie is going to be a very fast speedrun of the game exploiting one of the "exploration" glitches. To understand how this glitch works you have to understand how the games map data is stored in memory. There are 4 maps in the game. The first two are the light world overworld and dark world overworld; they are laid out in memory in a grid exactly how you see them when you are walking around the world. The other two maps are ones used for all the dungeons and interiors in the game. Each "room" in this map is the size of 4 small rooms ex. Link's House. Even if an interior like link's house appears to only have one room it is actually 4 tiles but 3 of them are just left blank. The main hall in Hyrule Castle is one of the only rooms in the game that utilizes all 4 tiles for it's room.

There are two dungeon maps. The first one is as large as the overworld map and contains all of the games dungeons as well as some interiors. The second dungeon map is much smaller and contains links house as well as a couple of the shop and town interiors. The map we care about for the speedrun is the first dungeon map. As I said previously it is as large as the overworld map and is laid out in memory in a grid. The key for this run is knowing that the very upper left room is Ganon's room where the final showdown takes place and if you exit this room to the north you can obtain the triforce and end the game.

So how do we get to this room? You can get here by performing what is known as an exploration glitch. The one we will be using is caused when a player passes through a doorway that would lead to another room, but is pressing both Up and Down at the same time. When you do this instead of performing the transition like it's supposed to you will glitch out and stop clipping through objects. This is because the coordinates for link are now all hosed and the game doesn't know if you are colliding with objects. After we perform the glitch we are simply walking through the dungeon map data until we hit ganon's room and obtain the triforce.

SECOND DUNGEON MAP EXPLORATION
The next glitch is another exploration glitch that allows the player to explore the second smaller dungeon map. In this glitch we have to perform a trick in the first save file to "trigger" the glitch and then start up a fresh game in the second save file. Rooms in the game can have two different elevations. You can jump down from the higher to the lower and when you do a variable is set in the games memory to make sure link can't get hit by enemies or move while he is mid jump.

If you save and quit the same mid-jump this variable is not reset. Therefore when we load the second game the program still thinks you are jumping to a lower platform. This causes link to jump "down" to a non-existant lower level in his house and clip through walls allowing us to explore the second dungeon map. Note that there is one exit out of this map that leads you to the upper left corner of the overworld map. I wanted to show this part of the glitch since you end up being stuck in a tree warping back and forth between the dark and light worlds but I fucked up and crashed the game by going to invalid memory (oops).

DEATH MOUNTAIN DESCENT
Death mountain descent is a very useful glitch. With this one you can explore the dark world without ever obtaining the second or third medallions or the master sword! This allows for a "challenge" run where you collect only the items necessary to complete the same, no extra heart pieces, and no master sword. Without the master sword you are unable to hit some bosses and are forced to use either arrows or the magic hammer. You also have 2 less hearts since you never complete the second or third dungeons.

This glitch exploits the magic mirror and another jumping bug. I'm not sure exactly how it works but you are basically placing link "inside" a wall and by warping back and forth you can trick the game into having link jump down to an area you are never meant to explore. Going south from here we can jump down to the graveyard in the dark world and continue the game normally. Note that if you jump down in the wrong spot link gets stuck and you have to reset the game. Note that the audio pause that happens in the game is me pausing the emulator to move link. You have to move link EXACTLY one pixel forward or you are simply ejected from the wall as normal.

CHRIS HOULIHAN ROOM
Before the release of the game Nintendo Power had a contest where the lucky winner would have their name featured in the upcoming legend of zelda! The lucky winner was Chris Houlihan. Unfortunately the room is very difficult to access and was not really explored until the internet days (poor kid). There are no real exploits used in the video to get to this room; it was simply hidden by the developers. Note you can also gain access to this room using an exploration glitch and simply walking to it in the map data.