For the average player, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will take upwards of 50 hours to beat--that is, complete the game's main storyline and save Hyrule. For regular players, conquering Tears of the Kingdom is all about diligence, patience, and creative crafting. For speedrunners, it's about using every tool at their disposal to push the limits of what the latest Zelda will allow. Theirs is a game of strategy, where each player is competing against themselves to work faster and smarter. The first to claim victory, Carl Wernicke, who goes by Gymnast86 online, hails from the US and set the record for his community with a time of 1:34:33.

The release of a new Zelda game is always a major event worldwide. Ever since 1986, when famed Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto first attempted to capture in code some of the wonder he experienced exploring the Kyoto countryside as a child, Zelda games have been pushing the boundaries of what's possible in virtual worlds. Look at any best-games-of-all-time list and you'll see Zelda in the Top 10, often more than once. But 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was particularly special. Launching alongside the Nintendo Switch console, which has since sold more than 125m units, it was perhaps the best realisation yet of the promise of boundless freedom and adventure that video games have been dangling in front of players' noses for decades.

The video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto once called the land of Hyrule "a miniature garden that you can put into a drawer and revisit anytime you like." Miyamoto conceived Hyrule, the setting for Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series, in 1986, and though its layout has changed often in the intervening decades, its ambiance of bucolic, occasionally threatening whimsy hasn't. Neither has the company's understanding of Zelda's essential purpose: to bring the great outdoors--the rollicking hills, the whispering caves, all that breezy, alfresco escapade--indoors. In recent years, Miyamoto, who is now sixty-four, has retreated to the position of Zelda's overseer, relinquishing control to younger directors inside the clandestine, Willy Wonka-esque factory that is Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters. But Hyrule remains indelibly his.