Speedrun

A speedrun is a playthrough of a game with the intention of completing it in the shortest amount of time possible. Unlike the Three Heart Challenge, optional upgrades are acceptable but are generally ignored if the amount of time they save is less than the time it takes to obtain them. Most speedrunners attempt to break personal or record times by using a variety of glitches to save time. However, external cheating devices, hacks, and custom game controllers are generally not allowed. A video of the gameplay is usually required in order to verify that a run was performed without cheating. Speedruns are often performed live via streaming services, most commonly Twitch. Sometimes, emulators may be used for runs, which are only allowed per community discretion.

Community
Speedrunning has given rise to its own community consisting of casual and world-class runners and their spectators. Much of the community is hosted on the live-streaming site, with leaderboards, guides, and documentation often hosted on the website Speedrun.com, and communities usually residing in servers on the Discord platform. The website (SDA) served as the original location for runs, forums, and documentation, however has since declined in activity over the years. Many speedrunners stream their runs live to spectators; usually on Twitch and using timing software, most commonly LiveSplit. Through Twitch, spectators can chat, participate, and even support runners monetarily by donating, cheering bits, or paying for or gifting a subscription to the runner's channel. Donors can sometimes add comments to their donations which runners, or a text-to-speech reader, may read aloud during or after the run. Many speedrunners also allow their donors to choose a file name for a run. Twice a year, charity marathons formerly hosted by SDA and now by themselves are held called "Awesome Games Done Quick" (peak winter event) and "Summer Games Done Quick" (off-peak summer event), where highly skilled and entertaining speedrunners congregate and live-stream speedruns to elicit donations from viewers for charitable causes.

The Legend of Zelda games are highly contested and constitute some of the most popular games for speedrunning. Zelda speedrunning has its own expansive sub-community. ZeldaSpeedRuns (ZSR) compiles information on speedruns of the games and formerly hosted the series' definitive speedrun leaderboards, which are now found at Speedrun.com.

Terminology
Speedrunners often create unique abbreviations and terminology for each game, which usually refer to important techniques or strategies ("strats"), many of which are exploitative glitches. Abbreviations can also refer to things such as items, locations, events, or run categories.

Glitches
Most speedruns rely on exploitative glitches and sequence breaks in order to finish the game more quickly. Glitches are a rallying point for the speedrunning community. The discovery of new glitches, usually a result of extensive research by members of the community, can lead to breakthroughs in a run category. This can reignite interest in a "dead" category, resulting in further competition and run improvement. A category "dies" when a strong, decisive record is made that cannot likely be beat. Competition in the category thus wanes until new strategies or glitches are discovered or utilized.

Some Zelda games are more "broken" than others. In and, massive sequence-breaking glitches exist that skip most of the game. These games can be completed in a matter of minutes – being possible in under 3 minutes;  in under 7. On the other hand, games such as, , and feature less drastic skips and still require several hours to complete.

Game Versions
Due to slight design changes between game versions per region, a specific version of a game may be more desirable than others for speedrunning. Many speedrunners prefer to play with the NTSC version of the game, because a PAL version of the same game is almost never optimized for the difference in frequencies (~60Hz for NTSC versus 50Hz for PAL) and thus would run more slowly. Japanese versions are frequently used for Zelda games, not only because Japan uses NTSC, but also because there is less text to wait through (The Japanese writing system utilizes a combination of Chinese logograms and its own syllabaries. These amount to a smaller volume of text than an equivalent translation written with the Latin alphabet).

For example, the Chinese version of for the iQue Player was at one point ideal for Any% speedruns due to fast text and minimal lag. However, it is less suitable for other categories because of the iQue's slow start screen, as well as being a more difficult version to obtain or access. The Japanese version, most commonly played using either the Wii Virtual Console, the Nintendo 64 version, or the GameCube version, is used for most categories now.

Categories
Multiple speedrunning categories exist for each game. Each category sets unique conditions under which the run must be completed.

 is the standard speedrunning category. The goal is simply to complete the game as quickly as possible without any other conditions.

 requires the completion of every dungeon before finishing the run, even if some dungeons may be skippable using exploits otherwise.

 runs aim to complete the game after obtaining every item, including all Heart Containers, quest items, and inventory items, for example. As the games do not always clarify what may count towards 100% completion or not, the criteria for 100% completion in speedruns is determined on a case-by-case basis by the game's speedrunning community, and may not necessarily include all criteria according to the 100% Completion page.

 runs must be completed without the use of glitches. What qualifies as a glitch is determined on a case-by-case basis by the game's speedrunning community.

Many categories exist that are unique to each game. For example, features an "All Masks" category, and  features several unique categories, including "Medallions, Stones, and Trials" (MST), "Defeat Ganon", and "No Wrong Warp".