The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Finished in 4 Minutes

It’s easy to do, and we’ll teach you how.

By Tom Marks

Speedrunning is a difficult and intimidating hobby to get into, but there’s one lightning-fast run that pretty much anyone can do.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is a fantastic game that the SNES Classic has made more easily accessible than ever before, and a relatively simple glitch was left in that will let you beat it in under four minutes.

Watch the video below to see it in action:

Here’s how to do it:

Make sure you watch the video so you understand what I'm talking about, but the crux of the run is a glitch that lets you clip into the wall, allowing you to walk to screens you wouldn’t usually be able to get to.

• Start a new game and head to Hyrule Castle to your sword, then follow the path to go in.
• Once inside the first main room, climb the center steps and walk to the ledge just to the left.
• Hop off the ledge and press ‘Select’ mid-air, then choose to save and quit the game.
• Reload your save and make your way back into the castle, but make sure you don’t touch any of the guards along the way. If you do, you’ll need to repeat the last step.
• Go up the stairs again, but this time exit through the door to the left.
• Wait for the blue guard to turn around (or slash him once to get his attention), then press left on the D-pad to continuously run up against the left wall just as the guard hits you.
• At this point, Link should disappear, now under and inside of the wall.
• Walk straight up until the screen changes, then go straight up one more screen and stop.
• Walk to the right using Link’s hat peeking through the wall as a guide, then stop when it disappears into the right wall. Make sure you don’t go another screen over, and don’t step out of the wall.
• Now just hold up on the D-pad and you’ll eventually walk past Ganon and into the final cutscene of the game!

So what’s going on here? When you save and quit mid-air, the game registers Link as being on a level lower than he actually is. Getting hit by a guard will reset this, which is why the glitched state breaks if you touch one too soon. But hitting the right guard while on the upper level will drop you beneath the floor, letting you walk into (under) the wall.

From there you can walk around like normal, and touching the edge of a screen scrolls you to the next screen just like it does in the overworld. All of Link to the Past’s dungeon screens are laid out on a grid, meaning if you know the right path you could conceivably wander to any stage you want.

Thankfully, Ganon’s boss room is directly above the room you perform the glitch in. And what else would happen when you walk past the door Ganon is guarding than the end of the game? Of course, the post-game cutscene that follows is a bit glitchy, with rain effects playing nonstop through the credits.

It's not the fastest way to beat Link to the Past, and not the flashiest speedrun in the world, but it’s simple enough that it’s totally worth giving a try if you recently picked up an SNES Classic.

Tom Marks is an Associate Editor focusing on PC gaming at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

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