A dog from a 25-year-old Zelda game is a real loser. No matter how many races he competes in against others of his kind, he just can’t win for the life of him. A programmer took on the problem and wanted to help the dog achieve victory.
Which dog is it about? We are 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 spin-off of the popular series and features quirky characters.
Among these characters is the blue dog, whom you encounter in a race. He has to compete against other dogs, each bearing a different color.
As a player, you can bet on one of the animals to earn rewards for a victory. The decision is difficult, as there are 14 dogs participating. Their performance varies each time and is calculated randomly.
Depending on the dog’s color, the four-legged friend has a different base speed. Subsequently, the game assigns the dogs to a new category for each race that affects their performance. Thus, a dog that is actually fast can be slowed down.
Especially unlucky is the blue dog, which already has the lowest base speed and, even with a buff, has no chance of crossing the finish line first. For 25 years now, the poor mutt has lost race after race – and all who bet on him lose as well.
A fan wanted to end this streak of bad luck and resorted to a trick.
Here you can see the trailer for a current Zelda title:
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 if a dog is precisely on it. If that is the case, he is declared the winner.
However, there is a glitch that ensures that a dog can reach an extension of the finish line halfway through the race, which is located at the opposite end of the racetrack. This is very unlikely and almost never occurs.
The blue dog would need to cross this line first halfway through the race – how is that supposed to happen when he is ridiculously slow? This question was also posed by the user Falkush, who has programming skills and created a script.
With it, he simulated thousands of races in a relatively short time. And indeed, the blue dog managed to achieve victory through this – although it wasn’t the correct finish line.
To grant the blue dog a real victory, Falkush developed another script. This assigned 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.
This allowed the blue dog to go home as a winner 25 years after the release of Majora’s Mask. However, it is still highly unlikely to achieve this result without technical aids and tricks. The YouTuber also referred to this, whose video explains the whole thing again in detail. Fans of Zelda might also be interested in: Link, the hero of your childhood, officially had a truly dark end
