How the Ocarina of Time Triforce became real in 2022

In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the 1998 Nintendo 64 game, the Triforce is shared among Link, Zelda and Ganondorf. The game never lets Link pick it up. A hoax in 1999 made it look possible. At Summer Games Done Quick 2022 a team of more than 25 people made it true on a real cartridge. They did it live, using only controller inputs.

A fake screenshot in February 1999 sent players hunting

On February 4, 1999, Ariana Almandoz, a gamer from Colombia, emailed the fan site Hyrule: The Legend of Zelda and said she had found the Triforce, according to Kotaku. She sent a screenshot a day later. Other images showed Link walking into a "Temple of Light" and playing a new song, the Overture of Sages. The owl Kaepora Gaebora taught it to him.

Readers noticed that Link's sword sat on the wrong side of his back. A forum user compared the images with the originals and found they did not match. In March, Almandoz admitted that "the pictures are a total fake." Her defense, as Kotaku quotes it, was "I didn't invent anything."

LevelUp reports that the rumor spread quickly and that she received thousands of emails from players asking for details. The rumor had something to stand on: AIPT points out that the Triforce could be obtained in three of the four Zelda games before this one. It also outlived the confession. AIPT quotes Nintendo Power answering it in its February 2001 issue: "The Triforce is not in the game. Period."

Link's held-object bug lets the game run code it was never meant to

The run uses a bug that Zelda Speedruns calls Stale Reference Manipulation. When Link carries a bush or a bomb overhead, he keeps a reference to that object, and he keeps writing his hand position into the object's memory.

If the object is unloaded while he still holds it, the reference goes stale but the writes continue. Players can trigger that by loading a new room while Link holds an object that has been culled, or by holding a bomb and freezing Link so it explodes in his hands. The game then loads something new into the freed memory, and the hand data lands on it. An actor's draw function pointer can be redirected to other code.

Speedrunners use this to give themselves items. Pushed all the way, it becomes arbitrary code execution, which means the console runs whatever the player supplies. Most speedrun categories ban that, though the Credits Warp in Any% uses it.

More than 25 people spent over 1,000 hours on Triforce%

The project is called Triforce%. TASVideos credits more than 25 people, with Sauraen as director, Savestate as the human runner and dwangoAC as executive producer. The team reports over a thousand hours of work across about two and a half years, on top of 21 years of community reverse engineering of the game.

The TASVideos page lists separate credits for scenario, scene design, music, animation, a Japanese-language voice for Link, an English voice for Zelda, and translation. It credits MrCheeze for the exploit setup. The cel-shaded look came from a patch to the graphics microcode that Sauraen conceived and glank first implemented. Most of the run was developed on a real N64.

At Summer Games Done Quick a replay device did it with button presses alone

The run lasted 53:05 in the TAS block at Summer Games Done Quick 2022. It used an original, unmodified US 1.0 cartridge in a real Nintendo 64 with a passive video-output mod. A replay device called TAStm32 sent the controller inputs. TASVideos describes it as a hybrid speedrun and tool-assisted performance.

The inputs first set up the bug. After that, a hyperspeed loader streamed data into the Expansion Pak's RAM through the controller ports. Scripts turned the team's programs and assets into button presses, and the game ran them as new scenes and music. The on-screen chat messages at the end were real: according to TASVideos, scripts read Twitch chat, filtered it and sent it to the console through the same controller ports. In July 2022 Set Side B wrote that players had finally "obtained" the Triforce after 23 years.

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Getting the Triforce here means a story scene, built partly from prerelease material

In the run Link does not open a chest that was hiding in the shipped game. In the TASVideos account, the Triforce is the end of a story the team made. The Triforce room, the pieces, the light and the chest were recreated from alpha and beta material. The acquisition scene and everything after it are original work.

The same story brings in two of the 1999 rumors. TASVideos lists the Running Man and the Overture of Sages as urban legends brought to life. In the shipped game the Running Man finishes at least one second ahead of you. The team made him a boss battle. My favorite part: a song from a faked screenshot now runs as real code on the game the hoax was about.

Where to see it today

The run itself is on YouTube. The team's GitHub release has no ROMs and no Nintendo code, only what they created. You can build the assets with your own copy of the US 1.0 game.

dwangoAC submitted the run to TASVideos in October 2022, and it sat as Delayed for about two years. The site needs an input file to verify a run, and a live show cannot supply one. The judge, Samsara, accepted it into the new Events class and wrote: "It didn't take us two years to be able to accept this. It took ten."

The game itself is in Nintendo's Nintendo 64 - Nintendo Classics collection, which needs a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack membership.

Questions people ask

Can you actually get the Triforce in Ocarina of Time?

Not in the game as Nintendo shipped it, and Nintendo Power said so in February 2001. At Summer Games Done Quick 2022 the Triforce% team made it happen on an unmodified US 1.0 cartridge, but only by running new code that held the scene.

Does Link ever obtain the full Triforce?

In this run, yes. It ends with an acquisition scene the team built.

Was it a speedrun?

Partly. TASVideos calls it a hybrid speedrun and tool-assisted performance. Savestate is credited as the human runner, and TASBot's replay device fed the console its inputs.

Is the Overture of Sages a real song?

Not in the shipped game. AIPT says neither it nor the Unicorn Fountain exists in the game's code. It only became playable when the Triforce% team wrote it into their story.