This got me thinking about speed running, playing a game with the intention of reaching the end a quickly as possible. Speedrunning is generally considered to have been popularised by Metroid as this game had five different endings which were determined by the length of time it took to defeat Mother Brain. The 'best' ending is achieved by completing the game in less than an hour and not only reveals that Samus is a woman but you get to see her in a purple bikini.
There are different types of speedruns with the easiest to conduct being the tool assisted speedrun. These use emulators in ease some of the challenges associated with a legitimate play through of the game by enabling the use of save states and also the option of slowing down or speeding up the game's frame rate. Twin Galaxies keep a record of what they consider to be the legitimate records for games on their website and looking there we can see that the record for Super Mario Bros. is 5 minutes 8 seconds and for Metroid is 17 minutes 22 seconds. Generally the rules associated with these records do not permit the player to exploit glitches or use cheats and as such the fastest listed Ocarina of Time completion time is just over 5 hours.
I find it interesting to note that after helping to create the sport of speedrunning the Metroid series revised their ending system to instead rely on what percentage of items were collected during the game.
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