How Zelda speedrunning inspired cursed Zelda mods

polygon.com:

Adding new playthrough rules or modding a game can make even a widely known classic feel exciting, fresh, and, in the best cases, totally new. This is the approach that streamer Eric “PointCrow” Morino has taken. He has made a name for himself playing mega-popular games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Pokémon with special rules or mods. Polygon spoke to him about his career and his approach to playing some of today’s most popular games in new, creative ways.

Morino started streaming on Twitch in winter of 2019 and began sharing compilation clips of his streams on YouTube the following summer. Since then, he’s grown his audience to include over 2 million subscribers on YouTube and roughly 600,000 followers on Twitch. But before he started streaming, he avidly watched the work of other speedrunners.

“One of the earliest videos that I remember really falling in love with was a long commentary of a speedrun of Majora’s Mask — this is back before they found arbitrary code execution. And I just was like, What if I did this? Like, what if I put my everyday challenges that I just give myself, and just put that towards video games?” Morino said via video chat. “And so I just started with Breath of the Wild. I love Zelda games. It’s one of the games that I fell in love with when I was a child, so I could kind of take the open world as it were and create new puzzles for myself.”

Since then, Morino has carved out a career by pulling unique experiences out of the well-trodden paths in Hyrule and other popular virtual worlds. Some, but not all, of his accomplishments include beating Breath of the Wild without walking and popularizing a new speedrunning category where streamers try to feed all the dogs as quickly as