The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been in our hands for a little while now, and during that time, speedrunners have naturally been competing to see who can get to the credits screen as quickly as possible. Upon launch, someone managed to beat the game in one hour and 34 minutes, but that record has been beaten time and time again over the past coupld of weeks. Today, we finally got the first sub-hour Tears of the Kingdom speedrun.
The proud owner of this record goes to Japanese YouTuber Zdi6923, who registered their Any% sub-hour run to speedrun.com earlier today. Clocking in at 59 minutes and 22 seconds, Zdi's run beats the previous record holder SlyZorua, who had clocked in a time of 1 hour, 2 minutes and 42 seconds. If you want to watch Zdi's record breaking run, it's been embedded down below for your viewing pleasure. It should be pretty obvious, but beware of spoilers if you do decide to watch.
If you want the cliff notes on how Zdi accomplished their record in case you're avoiding spoilers, they use a variety of glitches and tricks to make their way to the end of the game. Well over half of the run takes place on the first Great Sky Island, as Zdi quickly runs through each of the game's shrines to collect all of Link's abilities. To ensure they do this as quickly as possible, Zdi uses an infinite stamina glitch, which involves Link pulling out and sheathing his weapon in quick succession.
With all of the abilities acquired and barely a scrap of clothing to cover their body, they then grab a couple of gliders and make a beeline straight for Hyrule Castle, quickly diving inside and grabbing a diamond from a chest to fuse with a Royal Halberd get a decent weapon. After fiddling around in the menus for a while and thoroughly breaking the game, then then clip through the floor and fall into the Depths with the help of a Steering Stick, surviving the drop thanks to a previously obtained fairy.
I'll avoid describing anything else since it's pretty spoiler heavy from here on, but the rest of the video is a pretty impressive display of skill and knowledge of Tears of the Kingdom's lesser known glitches. At the time of writing, Zdi is still the game's only speedrunner to have beaten the game in less than an hour, though you'd probably expect that record to be beaten eventually as more glitches are found and attempts are made. There was definitely room for improvement on Zdi's run, so chances are we'll see this record broken sooner rather than later.