The N64 title The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of speedrunning's most enduring and popular games, beloved for its classic status and easily recognised stages. It also has different categories of speedrun, with the Any Percentage category involving the use of techniques that allow speedrunners to take advantage of glitches and bugs to aid them in their quest to complete the game in as quick a time as possible.
It's a hotly contested category for Ocarina of Time with the top three fastest times coming within the past year. Just two months ago, American speedrunner Murph_E achieved what was then a world record any% time for Ocarina of Time with a run of three minutes, 55 seconds, and 466 miliseconds. But now there is a new world record holder.
Yesterday, fellow American 'dannyb' completed an any% run in 3m 55s 300ms, besting the previous record holder by a mere 166 miliseconds. That might seem a trivially small amount, but at this elite level of speedrunning shaving miliseconds is what it's all about. Well, that is unless some new glitch or technique is found that can take full seconds off a run. You can watch dannyb's run in his video below:
The new world record holder's full name is Daniel Baamonde and he has his own YouTube channel where the speedrunner humbly describes himself as an engineer and developer "with lots of hobbies". Baamonde also posted his achievement on the r/speedrun subreddit where he informed a commentor that this past summer the Ocarina of Time community voted to start timing speedruns upon the player gaining control of Link so that they could use save files that had been saved after the intro video. This, of course, made runs that much quicker.
Speedrunning is a sport, hobby, or artform depending your perspective, but records can be toppled by the smallest of fractions. For example, this summer one Super Mario Bros. speedrunner beat the world record by just five frames. Now that's cutting it close.