In the late 2000s and early 2010s, when most players still treated The Legend of Zelda as a methodical, careful adventure, Narcissa Wright was learning how to tear those adventures apart. Raised in Stevens Point, Wisconsin and later trained in graphic design at Columbia College Chicago, she arrived in competitive gaming as a fan of glitches, message board discussions, and the strange joy of finishing a huge game in impossibly short time.
Under the handle CosmoWright she began running Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker, practicing for hours at a time while streaming on Twitch. Those long broadcasts built one of the earliest large audiences for full time speedrunning and turned her name into shorthand for Zelda played at the edge of what was thought possible.
Building SpeedRunsLive And A First Home For Races
Wright was not just a runner. In 2009 she partnered with fellow runner Daniel “Jiano” Hart to create SpeedRunsLive, a site and IRC based race bot that let runners queue into real time races against one another across any game they chose.
SpeedRunsLive gave an emerging subculture a structure. Instead of isolated personal best attempts, runners could meet up nightly to race Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Mega Man or obscure favorites, with the site tracking winners and offering simple tools for commentary and viewing. The project was widely described as a “highly developed speedrunning platform,” and its races helped seed later hubs like Games Done Quick and speedrun.com’s tournament scene.
Wright’s own channel became a showcase for this new race culture. She would spend nights racing other Zelda runners, resetting when things went wrong, laughing on headset when they went right, and explaining in plain language how each glitch and trick actually worked. That combination of mechanical mastery and open teaching style would define her legacy just as much as the records themselves.
Wind Waker, AGDQ, And The 22:38 That Sold A Scene
By 2012 and 2013, Wright’s name was tied to some of the fastest times ever recorded in Nintendo’s flagship series. On January 3, 2013, Twitch’s official blog congratulated her after she set a new world record in The Wind Waker, finishing the game in 4 hours 37 minutes 24 seconds in front of more than eighteen thousand live viewers.
That same era saw her become one of the public faces of Games Done Quick. At Awesome Games Done Quick 2013 she performed an any percent Ocarina of Time run in 22 minutes 38 seconds. The run was streamed live to thousands of viewers, later uploaded as “Run #123” for the marathon, and has been repeatedly cited as one of the most historically significant speedruns ever recorded.
Across AGDQ, Summer Games Done Quick, and other charity marathons like DreamHack 2014, Wright’s Zelda blocks helped define the look and feel of modern speedrunning: technical but accessible commentary, live glitch demonstrations, couch discussions, and a clear link between high level play and large scale fundraising.
The 18:10 That Rewrote Ocarina Of Time
Everything she had learned about routing, streaming, and live explanation came together in July 2014. Using the Chinese iQue Player release of Ocarina of Time, which featured faster text and favorable performance, Wright executed a blisteringly precise any percent route that defeated Ganon in 18 minutes and 10 seconds. The complete run was uploaded with live commentary that walked viewers through every clip, warp, and wrong warp.
For half a year that time stood as the world record and was widely regarded as nearly unbeatable for the category. More importantly for her long term legacy, the video itself became a touchstone. Commentators, journalists, and fellow runners pointed to the 18:10 both as a piece of technical mastery and as a clear, almost pedagogical explanation of how speedrunning worked for newcomers stumbling into Twitch or YouTube for the first time. Articles from gaming press to academic writing have treated that single run as a case study in how players bend game worlds to their will.
In later years the any percent world record for Ocarina of Time fell below 17 minutes and then under 13 as new glitches were discovered. Yet histories of the category still treat the 22:38 at AGDQ 2013 and the 18:10 iQue run in 2014 as the hinge of the story, the moment when Ocarina moved from “fast clear” to an almost mythic demonstration of tool assisted looking routing executed in real time.
Transition, Injuries, And Stepping Away From The Grind
While Wright was scaling those heights she was also dealing with injuries that would eventually force her away from daily record attempts. Years of high repetition practice led to serious hand and wrist pain. In a 2016 feature, Kotaku described her as one of the world’s best speedrunners who simply could not speedrun anymore because of those injuries.
At roughly the same time she came out publicly as a transgender woman in November 2015 and changed her name to Narcissa. The announcement, covered in later profiles and in the documentary Break the Game, brought an outpouring of support and also a wave of harassment and scrutiny that made streaming a more hostile space.
In response to both health problems and the emotional toll of being constantly on display, her broadcasts shifted away from record grinding toward more social games like Super Smash Bros. and Super Mario Maker and toward talking with her community. That change cost her some of the large audience built on high profile world record attempts, but it also gave her more room to inhabit streaming on her own terms.
By 2016 she had effectively stepped back from full time speedrunning. What remained was the archive of runs, tutorials, and races that had already helped teach a generation how to think about games as systems that could be broken and rebuilt.
Breath Of The Wild And A Brief Return To The Spotlight
When Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2017, Wright saw a new kind of challenge. In interviews she talked about being drawn to the game’s open structure and about her plan to stream it daily and chase another record.
Within weeks of release she established herself again as a contender, routing a full “all main quests” category and recording a time of 3 hours 43 minutes 32 seconds. Sites that covered the run treated it as a comeback moment for one of Zelda’s most famous runners, noting how striking it was to see her name back at the top of a leaderboard after such a difficult hiatus.
Yet the return had limits. Kotaku’s report on her Breath of the Wild grind noted that she remained worried about her hand health and could not sustain the kind of no break practice schedule that had defined her Ocarina of Time years. Her efforts around Breath of the Wild became less about permanently reclaiming the number one spot and more about proving she could still build a route, still read a game quickly, and still enjoy the process in front of a live audience.
In 2020 she briefly came back again to set a new any percent record for Ocarina of Time on original Nintendo 64 hardware, an achievement highlighted in later summaries of her career. Since then she has not pursued constant leaderboard contention, instead streaming more casually while the wider scene continues to evolve around the foundations she helped lay.
Documentaries, Reappraisal, And A Complicated Legacy
As the first wave of modern speedrunning ages into history, Wright’s career has become a subject in its own right. The 2023 documentary Break the Game uses the language and imagery of Zelda to follow her through the Breath of the Wild comeback, through online harassment, and through the everyday work of trying to live a public life with a body that no longer cooperates with marathon gaming.
Another documentary, Running with Speed, narrated and co written by speedrunning historian Summoning Salt, situates her Ocarina and Wind Waker achievements inside a broader history of the hobby. Both projects frame her as one of the essential figures of the first Twitch era, a runner whose story carries the promise and the pressures of becoming internet famous for being extremely good at something that did not yet have a roadmap.
Academic writers have also focused on her, treating the 18:10 run, the AGDQ 2013 performance, and the later Kotaku profile about her injuries as key texts for understanding how speedrunning manipulates game time and how queer players navigate visibility in gaming spaces.
Today she streams to a smaller, more intimate audience on platforms outside Twitch and remains largely inactive in day to day world record races. In place of constant new times, her influence shows up in the structure of almost every major marathon, in the presence of live commentated glitch exhibitions, in the very idea that viewers can “race along” with their favorite runners through sites modeled on SpeedRunsLive, and in the number of modern Zelda runners who cite her as the person who first showed them what was possible.
Speedrun Legacy Profile
Measured purely in numbers, Narcissa Wright’s list of achievements is already substantial. She held world records in multiple Zelda titles, including Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time, along with categories in Paper Mario and Castlevania 64, and she briefly reclaimed Ocarina on Nintendo 64, years after her first peak.
Measured as a builder of culture her legacy grows even larger. She co founded one of the first dedicated race platforms, helped turn Games Done Quick into appointment viewing, translated frame perfect tricks into digestible explanations for new viewers, and showed early on that speedrunning could be both technically deep and emotionally expressive.
For a Speedrun Legacy Profile, that combination matters as much as any single time. Wright’s greatest contribution is not just that she finished Ocarina of Time in 18 minutes and 10 seconds. It is that she taught thousands of people to see Hyrule differently, inspired many of the runners who would go on to break her times, and helped design the communal structures that keep those races going long after she stepped away from the grind.