A new Breath of the Wild glitch could be ‘holy grail’ of speedrunning

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild remains a popular choice for speedrunners, more than a year after launch. The community may have even happened upon a huge breakthrough for players: a new glitch that runners are calling a possible “holy grail of speedrunning.”

Two different speedrunners, RasenUrns and Wolkhaiksong19, happened upon what’s now called the Super Speed Launch during their Breath of the Wild speedrunning streams earlier this month. What they managed to accidentally do is get Link traveling at top-speed across Hyrule with his paraglider. This works by using Stasis on an object and then attacking; Link hops on top of it and is soon launched into the air. When he pulls out his glider, he continues to rocket farther and faster across the map than previously thought possible.

Here’s a clip from Raisinurns’ run:

This is from Wolkhaiksong19’s stream:

The community is trying to figure out two things: why this occurred and how to repeat it. Redditor iZant shared a hypothesis on the Speedrun forum about how Super Speed Launch may work:

Our main lead is that this is caused by lag frames. Upon analysis of video clips of the glitch, it was noted that there was a consistent frame drop happening around the time that link pulled the paraglider. Upon further testing of this, it was found that this glitch was easier to do in laggy areas of the game, most notably on the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild. Currently, most recordings are on Wii U, but the recordings i’m posting here are some of the first of this trick on Nintendo Switch, which is a version of the game with much less lag, seemingly making this more difficult to pull off. So right now, we think it’s caused by landing a lag frame on a specific frame relative to Link pulling out the paraglider after his rag doll animation from a stasis launch. This lag may confuse the game and alter is speed value to something higher, allowing him to fly at this extra fast speed.

Players have yet to find a way to reproduce this and keep it going consistently, but once they do, it looks like this will shave off a lot of time for speedruns. It’s like turning Link into Super Sonic Link, except with flying instead of running.

Until that happens, it’s fun to watch it in action. Check out another clip below; it’s from one of iZant’s test runs.