Game Faces: Cosmo Wright

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of my favorite games ever. I feel like I should know everything about the game, since I've finished the roughly 20-hour main storyline several times over the last 16 years.

I realized how little I knew when I saw Cosmo Wright finish the game in under 20 minutes.

Speedrunners race to finish video games as fast as possible. Some play the games fairly normally, if at a hyper-fast pace; others take advantage of glitches to try and get to the end by any means necessary.

Cosmo Wright's Ocarina of Time record uses a series of bugs to skip right from the beginning almost to the end. It's at once bizarre and impressive. What looks like a random and nonsensical series of actions is actually an incredibly precise routine, honed through hours upon hours of practice. At one point, he literally uses bugs; dropping a bottle of creepy crawlies all over the floor plays a part in his run.

A lot of people have told me they don't understand Twitch. They always ask: Why do you want to watch someone else play video games?

But I think there's something incredible about watching a game you love get ripped apart like that, because you can really appreciate the difficulty involved. They're doing things I would never ever thought to try and pulling it off with an unimaginable level of skill.

To me, watching speedrunners in action is utterly compelling viewing.