Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake – Everything We Know

Nintendo Just Remade the Greatest Game Ever Made

Every so often an announcement lands that makes the group chat go feral. This was one of them. At Summer Game Fest, with no real warning, Nintendo revealed a full remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — the 1998 Nintendo 64 classic that a very large slice of the gaming world considers the greatest game ever made — rebuilt from the ground up for modern hardware.

🗡️ This news is part of our The Legend of Zelda Hub — every mainline game reviewed and rated, plus the movies and the LEGO Zelda sets, all in one place.

If you were a kid in 1998, you know exactly why this matters. If you weren’t, the short version is: this is the game that taught 3D adventure design to the entire industry, and we’re about to get it again, properly, on a screen our kids will actually want to look at.

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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake – Reveal Trailer

Why Ocarina of Time Still Matters

Let me be clear-eyed about this, because “best game ever” gets thrown around far too easily. Ocarina of Time earns it. In 1998 it solved problems nobody had solved before: how do you fight in 3D without a camera fighting you back? Z-targeting. How do you make a giant world feel navigable? A horse, an overworld, and music that doubles as fast travel. How do you make a kid feel the weight of growing up? Pull the Master Sword and skip seven years in a single cut. It’s not nostalgia talking — the design is still studied today.

For a dad, the pull is specific and a little embarrassing in its intensity. This is the game I want to hand to my kid the way someone once handed it to me. The original still plays well, but a thirty-year-old N64 game is a hard sell to a child raised on 4K — the muddy textures and fog are a barrier, not a feature. A faithful, modern rebuild removes that barrier entirely. That’s the whole promise here.

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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo Switch 2) (opens in a new tab)

The remake itself, out 5 November 2026 on Switch 2.

What We Actually Know (And What We Don’t)

Here’s where the sceptical hat goes on, because hype is the enemy of a clear head — though after the September Direct there is very little left to be sceptical about. Confirmed: a 5 November 2026 release, exclusive to Switch 2, $59.99 for the download and $69.99 for the cartridge, an ESRB rating of Everyone 10+, a full rebuild rather than an up-res, voice acting, a proper jump, Zelda Notes support, and a long gameplay showing. Still open: whether the Water Temple gets a quality-of-life pass, and how the soundtrack has been handled.

The $59.99 is worth a sentence of its own, because it is the one number that could have gone badly. Nintendo has been charging $69.99 to $79.99 for its Switch 2 headliners, and a remake of the most revered game it owns was an obvious candidate for the top of that range. It came in at the old standard price instead. For a game you will hand to a child and then quietly play yourself after bedtime, that is the right side of the line.

The question I cared about most was whether Nintendo would “improve” a beloved classic into something that had lost what made it special — the risk that always sits under a remake of something this good. On the evidence of the demo, no. The changes are additive and the structure is untouched.

What Nintendo Showed at the Zelda 40th Anniversary Direct

We have gameplay, and it answers the question this page has been asking since June. Ocarina of Time releases 5 November 2026, a Thursday, exclusively on Switch 2.

The demo opened where the game opens: Link as a child in the Kokiri Forest. The first thing you notice is that it is recognisably the same place — same layout, same shapes, same tree. Rebuilt, not reinterpreted.

Then it cut to Hyrule Field, and that is where the scale of the work shows. The draw distance runs to the horizon. The field that in 1998 was a fog bank with a few landmarks in it is now a landscape you can see across, and the sense of a journey the original was reaching for is finally there in the picture rather than in your imagination. Castle Town followed, dense with the kind of detail the N64 could never hold.

The ocarina was the centrepiece. Play a song and the time of day still changes, the warps still work, the world still answers the music.

The four things that are actually new

Voice acting. The 1998 game had text boxes and grunts, and that silence is baked into how a lot of us remember it. This is the single biggest change on the list and the one most likely to divide people.

Link jumps and swims under your control. In the original the jump was automatic — run at a ledge and Link hopped it. Now it is yours.

You hum the song into the controller. Instead of pressing the note buttons, you hum or whistle the melody at the Joy-Con microphone.

Nintendo is selling a real ocarina you can play into the game. A physical instrument that the game listens to.

That last one is the detail I keep turning over. It could be a gimmick and I do not think it is, because the ocarina in this game was never a menu — it is the reason a generation of us can still hum six notes from memory. Handing someone an actual instrument and letting the song they play in the room be the song that changes the sky is a genuinely lovely bit of design.

Zelda Notes support is confirmed too, which matters more for families than it sounds — see below.

The Direct closed on a full trailer: the art style at length, Link riding across the field, several dungeons, and a proper look at combat. Nintendo’s own description of the look is “realistic yet nostalgic”, which is a marketing phrase that for once matches what is on screen. Watch it yourself — the Hyrule Field shot is the one that sells it.

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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — Gameplay Trailer

There is a Zelda Switch 2, and it lands first

Nintendo also announced a Legend of Zelda special edition Switch 2 and a matching Pro Controller, out 29 October — a Thursday, and exactly one week before the game.

That week is not an accident and it creates a real decision rather than a nice-to-have. If you were going to buy a Switch 2 anyway for someone this Christmas, the 40th-anniversary hardware arrives in time to be the thing you buy, and it will be gone long before Christmas if Nintendo’s history with anniversary hardware is any guide. If you already own a Switch 2, this is a want rather than a need, and the honest advice is the same as it is for every special edition: the game plays identically on the console you already have.

Nintendo’s own store now prices the 40th Anniversary console at $519.99 — twenty dollars over the $499.99 standard Switch 2. That is a smaller premium than special-edition hardware usually asks, and it is small enough that if you were buying a Switch 2 for someone this Christmas anyway, the decision more or less makes itself. The matching Pro Controller has no listing or price yet.

The Family Angle

This is, genuinely, a near-perfect family handover game. Ocarina of Time is rated E10+: fantasy adventure, light combat, a couple of genuinely creepy beats (the Bottom of the Well and the Shadow Temple gave a lot of us our first video-game scare). It rewards patience and curiosity over reflexes, which makes it ideal for playing alongside a kid — one of you on the pad, both of you puzzling out the next dungeon.

Zelda Notes is the quiet family headline. It is the free companion feature in the Nintendo Switch App — no Online membership needed — that already does voice-guided navigation for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, pointing you at where you are trying to get to. Put that on a 1998 dungeon crawler and you have an answer to the exact thing that makes this game hard to hand to a child: getting stuck, alone, with no idea what to try next. It is the difference between a kid bouncing off the Water Temple and a kid finishing it. Whether you want that on is a separate question, and it is nice that it is a question rather than a patch.

The rating question is now settled, and it settled the reassuring way. Nintendo’s store listing carries an ESRB rating of Everyone 10+ with the descriptors Animated Blood and Fantasy Violence — the same rating the 1998 original holds, so the rebuild has not pushed it up a tier. The two rooms that will actually rattle a child are still the Shadow Temple and the Bottom of the Well, and we walk through both of them, alongside every other game in the series, in Is Zelda OK for Kids?.

What’s Next

The Zelda 40th Anniversary Direct on 8 September delivered the date, the price and the deep look, so the calendar is the only thing left between here and Hyrule.

What is still open is short now: whether the Water Temple gets a quality-of-life pass, and how the soundtrack has been handled, because that music is sacred and a re-recording is the one change that could still go wrong. We will have a full review the moment it is in our hands.

Related Dadnology reviews: Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom cover the modern era of the franchise this remake reaches back before.