A dog from a 25 year old Zelda game is a real loser. No matter how many times he competes against others of his kind, he cannot possibly win. A programmer took on the problem and wanted to help the dog win.
Which dog is it about? We’re talking about a small, blue dog from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The game, which was released in 2000, around 25 years ago, is a dark offshoot of the popular series and features bizarre characters.
One of these characters is the blue dog, which you meet at a race. There he has to compete against other dogs, each of which has its own color.
As a player you can bet on one of the animals to win rewards. The decision is difficult because there are 14 dogs taking part. Their performance is different every time and is calculated randomly.
Depending on the color of the dog, the four-legged friend has a different basic speed. The game then assigns the dogs to a category for each race that influences their performance. This can slow down a dog that is actually moving fast.
The blue dog is particularly unlucky, as it already has the lowest basic speed and has no chance of being the first to cross the finish line even with a buff. For 25 years now, the poor mutt has been losing the race time and time again – and everyone who bet on him loses too.
A fan wanted to end this streak of bad luck and used a trick.
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A long-awaited victory
How can the blue dog win? YouTuber Vidya James explains in a video how Majora’s Mask determines the winner of the race. According to him, the game divides the racetrack into different zones.
Where they overlap is the finish line – a very narrow area. The game regularly checks whether a dog is on it precisely. If this is the case, he is chosen as the winner.
However, there is a glitch that causes a dog halfway through the race to hit an extension of the finish line located at the opposite end of the racetrack. This is very unlikely and almost never happens.
The blue dog would have to be the first to cross this line halfway through the route – how is that supposed to work, he’s incredibly slow? The user Falkush, who has programming skills and created a script, also asked himself this question.
He used this to simulate thousands of races in a relatively short period of time. And the blue dog actually managed to win – even though it wasn’t the right finish line.
In order to give the blue dog a real victory, Falkush developed another script. This gave the best dogs the worst stats and buffed the blue dog. After an incredible 30,000 attempts, the eternal loser finally achieved victory – this time at the official finish line.
So the blue dog was able to go home as the winner 25 years after Majora’s Mask was published. It is still highly unlikely to achieve this result without technical aids and tricks. The YouTuber also pointed this out, whose video explains the whole thing in detail. Fans of Zelda might also be interested in this: Link, the hero of your childhood, officially had a really dark end