The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the most sprawling, massive video games to be released for a Nintendo console. It’s a game designed to eat entire weekends, as players spend dozens, or even hundreds of hours finding every little secret the world has to offer. Finishing it is a serious time investment.

For Ithaca College senior Benjamin LeBlanc, it’s Tuesday.

LeBlanc is a speedrunner, somebody who plays a video game as quickly as possible to finish the game in a fraction of the time it would take someone playing the game normally. Typically this is accomplished by having advanced knowledge of the game’s mechanics, or knowing how to perform certain exploits. Speedruns for games are sometimes split into two or more categories depending on certain criteria, such as the amount of content that needs to be cleared, or whether or not specific software bugs are allowed. Software bugs, commonly just called bugs, are unintentional failures in a game’s code that allow for scenarios not planned for by the game developers.

LeBlanc is the world record holder in one of several categories for Breath of the Wild speedrunners, the all-shrines run, which requires a player to clear 120 mini-challenges within the game. His time is seven hours, 38 minutes and 49 seconds. LeBlanc said one of the hard parts of the run is staying focused for such a long amount of time.

“Sometimes you end up making a big mistake, and it’s kind of rattling when you know you have so much more to go,” LeBlanc said. “That’s one of the challenges. It’s very easy to perform all the tricks, but it’s another challenge just to be able to perform well for that long.”

The first game to be widely played for speedruns was the original Doom in 1994, during the early days of the internet. Since then the community has grown. The website speedrun.com, created for posting the time it takes to finish a game, has 174,294 registered users.

Even though LeBlanc holds the world record for Breath of the Wild, he still attempts the run roughly once a week to try and improve his own time. He said one of the barriers of performing the run is its length, because he must balance schoolwork and a social life.

“I have to plan everything ahead of time to know how much time I can actually spend playing the game,” he said.

LeBlanc also livestreams himself performing the run on Twitch, a livestreaming platform owned by Amazon. Twitch users typically stream themselves playing video games, although other creative content is also supported. LeBlanc streams under the username ILoveVark, and has 4,614 followers.

“It’s kind of humbling, and kind of cool that a lot of people like to watch it,” LeBlanc said. “It’s something so dumb to me, that anyone would actually want to watch it, but I think it’s pretty cool people like to watch one of my interests.”

LeBlanc has done speedruns of other games in the past. He said the game he took most seriously before Breath of the Wild was Luigi’s Mansion, a game about capturing ghosts and exploring a haunted mansion, for Nintendo Gamecube. LeBlanc held several world records across multiple categories for Luigi’s Mansion through 2017, but all of his times have since been beaten.

LeBlanc is planning on attending the next Games Done Quick, a semi-annual charity marathon where gamers speedrun games to raise money for non-profits. Speedruns are streamed on Twitch for viewers at home, but the event also serves as a mini-convention for speedrunners to network.  LeBlanc attended a previous GDQ held in January of this year, where he said he had a positive experience.

“It was really fun … you build a certain friendship [with other runners], and it was really cool to go for the first time,” he said. “A lot of them are my age and also going to school and living normal lives outside of [speedrunning].”

LeBlanc said he might speedrun other games in the future, but for now his sole focus is improving his time for Breath of the Wild.

In the video, LeBlanc shows us a trick to save time. Normally this shrine would take a few minutes, but LeBlanc said without explaining himself step-by-step his process takes 30-40 seconds.