andre and i were talking about this over the weekend...

Avid runners strive to break a four-minute mile. Test pilots used to risk their lives trying to pierce the sound barrier. In the Nevada desert, rocket cars are raced ever closer to 800 miles per hour.

But for Texas' Mike Damiani, 22, the outer limit is the five-hour mark on the 1998 Nintendo 64 game "The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time." To conquer the game by that mark requires sustained focus. "You can't be perfect at this game for five hours," he said. "Some mistakes are going to slip in."

Mere mortals generally require over 20 hours to complete the game. But in the spring of 2004, Damiani clocked a run of five hours and four minutes. He has dedicated this year — his graduation year at the University of Texas — to break on through and topple records in every other major "Zelda" game while he's at it.

"I want to have the world record on each," he said. "That's my lifetime goal."

For a select group of players, the glory of gaming involves not simply completing a beloved title, but beating it more quickly than anyone else in the world — and letting everyone know about it. Captured in video and posted to the Internet, these sprints through games are called speed runs.

The biggest online repository of speed runs is SpeedDemosArchive.com, run by 25-year-old Nolan Pflug of Pittsburgh. "I'm pretty swamped," Pflug said, noting that he receives about five runs a week for the site, which started with 10 a year and a half ago and now has more than 100. Even the least popular get 50 downloads a day, he said. A quarter-hour dash through the epic "Morrowind" was downloaded 100,000 times in a week.