Blub Alert: "The impossible is only the untried."

Jordan Verner, a blind gamer in Ontario, completed Zelda in November after a two-year project led by fellow gamer (but total stranger) Roy Williams, who saw Verner's request for help online:

[Full transcript below.]

[Video of young white man being blindfolded; he says, "Leave my ears open so I can hear." Video segues into man playing the video game The Legend of Zelda while blindfolded.]

Voiceover: Roy Williams will be the first to admit that playing a video game blindfolded seems, well—

Williams: Ultra-nerdy. [laughs]

Voiceover. Yes. It is unique. In fact, he's probably the only guy in Camden with this level of dedication.

Williams: When I was little, I played this game hours on end.

Voiceover: But on the internet, he's just one of many. And over the years, he's become pretty close friends with other gamers from around North America, all of them fanatic about Zelda, a fantasy adventure game. On YouTube, you'll find tons of fan videos; in some, players try to speed run, or beat the game as fast as they can. But it was another feat that stood out to Roy and his friends.

Williams: It was basically like a call for help to people online.

[Video of another young white man speaking on a YouTube video.]

Voiceover: It was a video like this one, by Jordan Verner of Ontario, Canada. He was playing small parts of the game—blind.

Verner: I was never encouraged, or even permitted, for that matter, to see blindness as a total roadblock.

Voiceover: Through Skype, Jordan says that he asked for help in completing the entire game—help that he didn't seriously expect.

Verner: I thought, "That's far from reality. That's more fantasy than the game itself."

Williams: When I was younger, a doctor told me that I was gonna go blind, which turned out not to be so, but [laughs]—and it scared me, and I was like, "I wanna be able to help this person get past, get through his disability.

Voiceover: So Williams and three other diehard gamers each took different parts and copied down every…single…move.

Williams: Every time we make a move—we roll, we jump, we do anything—we type down in the computer exactly what we're doing. [Williams reads from detailed script on computer screen.] Turn one hundred and eighty degrees; one back-flip; you'll hear the noise of a skulltula hitting the ground—

Voiceover: Verner would then take the script and have his computer read it to him as he played. An average gamer will take about a week to play through the entire thing, but this project took almost two years—and more than one hundred thousand keystrokes. Finally, in November of last year, Jordan beat the entire thing.

Verner: It felt great. It—I felt strong. I felt, you know, sky's the limit.

Williams: I'm glad that everyone can see and learn from this that just because a person has a disability doesn't mean that they can't do a normal thing, like play a video game.

Voiceover: So despite the fact that this [video of Williams playing blindfolded again] might look just a little weird, try and see things the way Jordan does.

Verner: Our school's motto, and I live by it, is: "The impossible is only the untried."

Voiceover: And suddenly this [video of Williams playing blindfolded again] seems pretty cool.