Carl Wernicke, known online as Gymnast86 (stylized as gymnast86), is an American speedrunner and streamer notable for his speedrunning world records and discovery of exploits in various 3D Zelda games.
[2] In March 2018, Wernicke regained the world record in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD under any completion percent with a time of 1:03:30.
[4] After LinkOscuro successfully performed "barrier skip", a long-hypothesized glitch in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker which would allow the player to clip through a large barrier surrounding Hyrule Castle, a location visited multiple times during normal play, but only allowing the player to break the barrier and access the final dungeon as intended during the third and final visit, Wernicke replicated the glitch and found a consistent method for performing the exploit, drastically altering the speedrun route by allowing players to escape Hyrule Castle and enter the endgame far earlier than intended.
Previously, a glitch known as "zombie hovering", performed at the end of the speedrun, was needed in the Wii U version of the game to enter the door at the top of the room leading to the final boss battle, as prior upgrades that are meant to be used to access the door - while intended to be required to complete the game during normal play - are not obtained in the speedrun.
Wernicke, however, discovered an exploit that instead used an enemy known as a "Morth" to spawn a health-restoring heart under specific conditions, removing the need for the luck associated with performing the trick.