The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time · Nintendo 64 · 1998 · Wrong Warp / ACE · Discovered by Zelda speedrun/TAS community
A family of exploits that corrupts Ocarina of Time’s scene and actor data to teleport Link to unintended places — ultimately warping straight into the credits and collapsing the world record to under 13 minutes.
Ocarina of Time tracks where Link should appear using two internal values — a Base Entrance Index and a Scene Setup Index — and a "wrong warp" sets these to combinations the developers never intended, dropping Link into the wrong area. The more advanced Stale Reference Manipulation (SRM) goes further: by keeping the game referencing an "actor" (an object) in memory after it should have been cleared, runners can overwrite game data, changing a chest’s contents or corrupting execution outright. Chained together, these techniques achieve arbitrary code execution that jumps directly to the game’s ending. The any% credits warp bypasses both boss fights and the entire castle-escape sequence, and its discovery revolutionised Zelda speedrunning — runner Lozoots used it to finish the game in 12:59, cutting more than four minutes off the previous record in a single leap.
To a spectator, an any% Ocarina of Time run looks like nonsense: Link performs a flurry of precise, seemingly meaningless actions in Kokiri Forest and then, abruptly, the end credits roll. Underneath, the runner has been carefully setting the values that control scene transitions and exploiting the game’s failure to clean up objects in memory, steering the console into loading the ending as if the quest were complete.
The breakthrough reshaped the game’s competitive scene almost overnight. A category that had been measured in careful, hours-long routes suddenly became a sub-13-minute sprint of frame-precise setups, splitting the community into "credits warp" and "no credits warp" categories so that the older, more conventional playthrough could survive alongside the exploit. It stands with the Super Mario World credits warp as proof that even the most polished N64 classics are, at bottom, machines that can be talked into lying about their own state.