Nintendo Goes Back to the Zelda Well

Over the past few quarters, seemingly all videogame console makers have been in a rut. Some of it was out of their control – the memory chip and other component shortages have forced price-rises in a time when they might otherwise be dropping prices. Some of it was shooting themselves in the foot with stupid strategy for years – see: Xbox. But a lot of it just seems cyclical, hit games come and go but generally can't be timed, but it's exacerbated by the fact that the industry has been caught waiting for Grand Theft Auto VI, which has seen delay after delay after delay.

But Nintendo should have been largely immune to the first two, as the Switch was clearly the right strategy – including releasing a Switch 2 which follows the same model, but is just better – and tied to that is their fantastic IP which makes them more immune from needing a GTA-sized hit to move their consoles. And yet, Nintendo has been struggling too. Some of it is the pricing situation, but more of it is simply the slow-roll of new hit games. But again, Nintendo has that IP. And while it make take years to make a new Zelda game, you know what they can do faster (and cheaper)? Remake an old one:

Nintendo Co. sold 5.2 million copies of its The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake in just four days, invigorating the Switch 2 platform that had been waiting for a blockbuster hit.

Released on Nov. 5 for $59.99, the 2026 edition is a complete recreation of the 1998 classic action-adventure game for the Nintendo 64 console, replete with new graphics, level and character designs. It ranks among the best-reviewed video games of recent times, earning a score of 96 out of 100 from both players and professional reviewers on aggregator Metacritic.

It's a massive number of copies in a few days, but it shouldn't be a surprise. Ocarina of Time is widely considered to be one of the best games of all-time. That doesn't cease to be the case simply because it's old. At the same time, to entice the new generation of gamers, many of which were not alive 28 years ago when it was first released, you obviously need to update the game to be more "modern".

The only thing that surprises me is that it took Nintendo so long to stumble upon this strategy. I mean, I wrote about how they should do this almost 13 years ago – when they were last in a rut before the Switch came into being.¹ As I wrote back then:

Step two of my strategy would involve updating old classics to run with updated HD graphics and new levels. New Mario. New Zelda. New Icarus. New Donkey Kong. New Pokemon. Same idea. Updated graphics. New levels. These games would be $15 to $25 depending on the game. Stagger them.

My only mistake was undercutting the price they could charge – by more than half! That was a silly mistake. It's not like Hollywood charges half the ticket price when they remake old hit movies.

Of course, remaking old games isn't entirely new, but Nintendo has historically focused on more minor updates to classic games, or made such revamps a smaller part of a bigger package with things like New Super Mario Bros. Part of the issue was that games from the 1980s were quite small in scope due to technology limits at the times. But as we got well into the 1990s, that scope expanded fast, and so games like Ocarina can warrant an actual full remake without it seeming a bit silly – as remaking a silent movie for a modern audience might be.

So perhaps we should consider this "new retro" gaming. Old, beloved games that don't rely solely on nostalgia, but can still hold up on their own with some fresh paint and updated controls for a more modern audience.²

It's sort of funny to think of Ocarina of Time as "retro" but it's 28 years old! A 28-year-old game that came out in 1998 when Ocarina was released would have been from 1970. There's no reason "retro" needs to only include 8-bit titles, of course. And so now Nintendo finally has a playbook – and a killer data point – for a lot more of this.³

¹ To be clear, my main idea was to do a $99 retro console of sorts focused on these nostalgic games. Nintendo eventually sort of did this as well, though more down-the-middle mini versions of actual old consoles (which were cheaper and oddly meant as more of a novelty). ↩

² Also useful when you have a big Legend of Zelda movie launching into theaters next year! ↩

³ To be clear, that can't just rely on these older titles being remade, obviously. But it's an easy and relatively cheap way to keep up momentum between big, fully new releases. Though that's a lesson Hollywood needs to relearn every so often. ↩