Why Now Is the Perfect Time for a Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake

Well, it’s official: The 1998 Nintendo 64 classic, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is getting a brand new remake. It’s coming to Nintendo Switch 2 late this year, and even though we’ve seen very little of it, it already looks utterly gorgeous.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda series (and the almost-30th anniversary of this entry in particular), making now as good a time as any to bring this masterpiece back out to shine. But there are a few even bigger reasons why it’s the right move right now.

Since you’re reading IGN, you already know and love video games, so I’ll save you the lengthy recap of why Ocarina of Time is so incredible. But let’s do the basics: It’s regularly near the top of every “Greatest Zelda Game of All Time” and “Greatest Video Game of All Time” lists. It revolutionized what a third person action-adventure game could look like, adding a whole new dimension to the rock-solid groundwork laid down by its 2D predecessor, A Link to the Past. Ocarina’s time jumping story is full of heart and humor, regularly engaging in epic conflicts, and between its meticulously crafted puzzle box dungeons and grand, sweeping vistas brimming with secrets and mysteries, it forever raised the bar for not only the Zelda series, but the medium of video games as a whole.

I have fond memories of saving up for Ocarina of Time for months when I was a kid, buying it the day it was released, and sitting on a curb in a Toys R Us parking lot, poring over the manual while waiting for my dad to pick me up and bring me home, where I’d go on to spend countless hours exploring Hyrule. It always and forever will be an outstanding game which I cherish dearly. IGN’s Peer Schneider gave it a 10 out of 10 back in 1998, and I wholeheartedly still agree with that score.

But it’s also a game many of us have played already, and so you’re probably wondering exactly what Nintendo could do to differentiate this version of Ocarina of Time from every other version it has shipped since 1998. It’s even already been remade, back in 2011 for the Nintendo 3DS. So how could a Switch 2 remake possibly improve on that?

To potentially answer that question, look no further than the soon-to-be-released Switch 2 remake of Star Fox 64. Not only is Star Fox also a beloved N64 game that has been ported to various Nintendo consoles, it also got a Nintendo 3DS remake in 2011. Like the Ocarina 3DS remake, it largely stuck to the original game’s blueprint while adding brand new graphics and dual screen features. And while the Star Fox franchise has never come close to Zelda’s popularity, the parallels across Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64’s journey from the N64 to the 3DS to the Nintendo Switch 2 are fascinating to see.

Star Fox perhaps offers a vision of what we can expect from Ocarina of Time. Its Switch 2 remake has a completely overhauled art style with stunning new graphics, fully re-recorded voices, sound effects, and music, and tons of new features, modes, and additional bells and whistles. Sure, the 2011 remake also boasted visual improvements over the original, but seeing the 3DS and Switch 2 remakes of Star Fox side by side will show you that Nintendo isn’t just phoning it in and making a quick buck off of nostalgia.

Looking at our first official glimpses of the Ocarina of Time remake revealed so far, it seems like it’s definitely getting a similar treatment. A brand new, fully voiced narrator introduces the story and our fairy-less elf, Link, as handwoven tapestries fade to reveal a beautifully recreated shot of when we first see our hero in the original game, now with vibrant lighting and tons of meticulous little details to flesh out his cold but cozy little house in a tree. Some of these details are present in the original game and some of them aren’t, but it all feels familiar. There's not much to go on just yet (despite the game coming to Switch 2 at some point in the next six months) but the debut trailer is already telling us that Nintendo isn’t simply improving some textures and remastering some songs.

So why take two Nintendo 64 classics that already got 3DS remakes and remake them yet again for Switch 2 this year? Well for starters, those remakes were designed entirely around a dual screen handheld device that most people don’t have access to in 2026. Not only is original 3DS hardware becoming increasingly more expensive as the years go by and the nostalgia-driven aftermarket for old video games continues to grow, but putting dual screen games on a single-screen console like the Nintendo Switch 2 isn’t easy. It’s why so many fantastic DS and 3DS games are stuck on those systems, never to be ported to modern Nintendo hardware. The Ocarina and Star Fox remakes, plus countless other gems, are games designed for tiny low-res dual screen devices, and porting them to a single screen device like the Switch 2 would require the entire game to be reworked from the ground up. And if you’re going to put in that much effort to port a 3DS remake of an N64 game to the Nintendo Switch 2, you’d might as well just go all-in and remake the game again.

(Here’s me manifesting a similar treatment for A Link Between Worlds. And hey, listen, maybe even Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks while I’m at it. The Switch 2 has a touch screen, after all!)

So the lack of easy access to the 3DS is one reason why now is the perfect time for an Ocarina remake. But there’s another, equally frustrating one: the massive gap between Zelda games. There was a six-year gap between the release of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, despite the fact that Tears used so many of BotW’s assets, systems, and locations. This gigantic sandbox take on the Zelda formula is clearly the blueprint going forward, which means – like most big video game sequels these days – a five or six year wait between sequels seems likely for the foreseeable future. That’s a pretty untenable stretch of time for a franchise to go without any notable game releases, which is why since Breath of the Wild launched in 2017 we’ve seen smaller Zelda games like Cadence of Hyrule, the Link’s Awakening remake, and Echoes of Wisdom launch, keeping Zelda fans occupied during those long waits. If waiting six or more years between big open world Zelda games is the new normal now, that means we’re at least three years away from the next mainline Zelda. An Ocarina of Time remake is the perfect thing to help hold us over, and much easier to make, too. After all, the entire blueprint for it has existed for almost 30 years.

While a remake is the perfect solution to that long wait between sequels, there’s also something else to consider. The Legend of Zelda is about to have a gigantic big screen moment on April 30, 2027 – just a few months after the Ocarina of Time remake is set to be released. A live-action Zelda movie hitting theaters will introduce a whole new audience to this series for the first time. Having a stunning new remake of the most iconic Zelda game on store shelves and at the top of the Nintendo Switch 2’s eShop in time for the movie’s premiere makes perfect sense. After all, it’s happened before: Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 got Nintendo Switch remasters six months before The Super Mario Galaxy Movie premiered. Kids saw the Mario movie, wanted a Mario game to play, and Nintendo made sure they had something ready, even if it was something many of us played ages ago.

Imagine being a 10 year old who walks out of the Zelda movie, heads home, grabs their Nintendo Switch 2, and plays Ocarina of Time for the first time in their lives. It’s hard not to be envious of experiencing a moment like that. Also, consider this: it’s been almost three decades since the original game launched, and it seems pretty likely that a sizable number of people who played it back then now have children of their own. Hmm, if only there was a Zelda game about experiencing how the world changes from the perspective of a child and the perspective of an adult…

Of course, it’s not all magical when it comes to remakes. Across all forms of media, remakes of beloved classics are historically a tricky balance of trying to modernize something ancient while honoring its original vision, and Ocarina of Time will be no exception. Should Nintendo make Hyrule field bigger, since present day gamers trained on massive open worlds expect a grand sandbox to play in? Or should they retain the scale of the original because the whole game was designed around it? Should they streamline the notoriously cumbersome Water Temple even further than they did in the 3DS remake? And what about including content from previous Ocarina of Time releases, like the awesome Master Mode, which remixes the dungeon layouts along with additional tweaks and challenges? Expectations for a project like this are understandably through the roof, and while the Ocarina of Time and Star Fox remakes on 3DS largely played it safe, Nintendo did make a few changes in the Majora’s Mask 3DS remake (such as altering some boss fights and the overall save mechanic) that weren’t as well received. Even the smallest change deemed incorrect by the community could stain this remake’s legacy.

Regardless of the changes it makes, and regardless of if it becomes the definitive version, now is clearly the perfect time for an Ocarina of Time remake. The original and its 2011 remake are largely inaccessible to modern players, we’ll be waiting years for the follow-up to Tears of the Kingdom, and the movie is right around the corner in 2027. All the stars are aligned. And I can’t wait. Ocarina of Time is one of my favorite games of all time, and I’ll get to experience it again in a way it’s never looked before, this time alongside my daughter (we recently finished up Twilight Princess, which is still fantastic, by the way). It’s awesome that younger gamers will get to play this game as if it's a brand new Zelda game, because for many of them, it will be.