 Today's a bit of a special day in many of our lives, at least when it comes to Zelda fans, because today is Ocarina of Time's 25th anniversary of its release in Japan, which makes it technically the official anniversary of the game. Yes, it had different release dates in different territories, and we could talk about all of that. But in reality, we are here today making this video because Ocarina of Time is 25 years old. You guys might know that it might feel a bit strange that I'm even talking about this game on its 25th anniversary. There's a couple of reasons because of some cool little fan projects that are going on. Also the idea that Nintendo might be currently developing a 4K Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2, and we'll get into that as well and talk about that stuff. But first I just wanna note that Ocarina of Time is a very important game to me. It's a very important game in my career as a content creator. And we're gonna talk about that in the third act of this video, but I just want people to know this because a lot of people have heard over the years that Ocarina of Time isn't in my top 10 Zelda games and blah, blah, blah. And a lot of you are already clicking off this video because I'm reminding people of that. But the reality is that regardless of where I rank Ocarina of Time today amongst my favorite Zelda games, it is a fundamentally important part of gaming history and it's a fundamentally important part of my life. Now I'm not the only one that it's important for. Another YouTuber called Rewan Link put up this animation that you're seeing right now, full credit to him, he just dropped it today. It's a Studio Ghibli inspired and styled film that he's working on. He's working on an Ocarina of Time film to kind of give people who've been always wanting that Studio Ghibli style Zelda film a chance. He made it in Unreal Engine 5 and he claimed that he's been working on this for six months with over 600 hours put in on top of his full-time job. You do the math, I mean that's over six hours a day that he's working on. So he's basically working two full-time jobs, one of them being his work on this. You guys should absolutely go check out his channel. He's got other clips and other fantastic things he's done in the past with Ocarina of Time in particular. And this one he's calling Castle Town because it's like the stop animation style Studio Ghibli thing that he did in Castle Town. It's just obviously awesome. It's not one-to-one exactly how things progress in Ocarina of Time, but that's not the point. He's trying to make it into a film style and you gotta add some flares, some differences, Zelda in the carriage and all this other stuff he's doing. And I just think it's utterly amazing what the Zelda fan community is able to pull off. I obviously sincerely hope Nintendo doesn't shut down this project. It's been going on for long enough now that I think Nintendo is probably gonna leave it alone. One thing Nintendo has been leaving alone among fan projects are these Unreal Engine 5 projects so long as they're not providing playable demos. If they're just making it for themselves and recording videos, they're certainly allowed to do it. In the case of this, this isn't meant to be playable. It's literally being built specifically for film. But I just find this project to be utterly amazing and I wanted to give it some attention. So if you wanna hear it with the full sound effects and all the music and everything else and watch the entire thing, including where he goes through a few explanations and he also does a walkthrough because this is a project made in Unreal Engine 5 so you can literally walk in the world of Castle Town. If you wanna go check that out, I really encourage you to. We'll put a link down to his channel and this video down below. But yeah, I just wanted to point out that this among many, many other fan-created projects are dropping today to celebrate our community time's 25th anniversary. By the way, before we continue in this video, hey guys, you know what? Subscribe to the channel and maybe you can have these cookies that are raining down all around me, rain down on you because who doesn't want some Oreos with a nice glass of milk? Oh, man, these look pretty good. By the way, go ahead and drop a like as well if you're enjoying the content and let's get into the rest of the video. Now, this is where we're gonna get into maybe the meat and potatoes of the video. This is talking about Nintendo possibly making Ocarina of Time 4K and any possible evidence and rumors and reports out there that it's actually an act of development. Now, the big things to remember with Ocarina of Time and it being 25 years old is we really have only one comment from series producer A.G. Alnuma talking about the game itself. And this is the sort of hint we have from them. We've talked about this before. In fact, most of the stuff we've talked about before just feels appropriate today. I think you guys can understand 25th anniversary. It just feels appropriate to revisit this. And he brought up in an interview that he did for basically a Nintendo asks series of interviews and he brought up in their RaRu from Tears of the Kingdom. It was brought up in a question and he responded to the question saying that he's not sure if people are aware of the original RaRu character. Character is important because RaRu first appeared in the series as a town in Zelda 2 but RaRu as a character first appeared in the Legend of Zelda series in Ocarina of Time. And it's obvious why he would say something like this. If you think about how many people have played Breath of the Wild over 30 million. Think about how many people have played Tears of the Kingdom over 20 million. These are much larger player bases than we're playing games like Ocarina of Time back in 1998. So it's very obvious why he would say something like this because yeah, there is a very, very high likelihood that a majority of people playing, you know, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom had never played Ocarina of Time and don't even know who the original RaRu character is. Now, why would this actually mean anything? Well, he's dropped hints like this over the years for two other remakes. He actually dropped a very similar cryptic hint for Link's Awakening all the way back in 2016, believe it or not. He dropped a very cryptic hint similar where he just sort of one-off mentioned something without being asked specifically. Like he wasn't being berated about what's gonna be the next remade Zelda game. He just sort of made this one-off comment that was a underhanded, I don't wanna say underhanded, more of a secret hint for anyone in the know at Link's Awakening and yeah, obviously that precursor, Link's Awakening, being remade on Nintendo Switch. He obviously knew that was happening and he was just making a reference that very, very few fans even caught back then. And then obviously we know the more direct one when he was on stage at a concert and he said, yeah, Skyward Sword HD, right? Like he just talked about how people want it and sure enough, a couple of years later, we ended up getting Skyward Sword HD. Now that was a more direct boom in your face. Hey, we're probably doing this project. Nintendo even came out after he made those comments and clarified we have no plans to make Skyward Sword HD. And yeah, Skyward Sword HD happened. So, but that was a more direct thing. The Link's Awakening one is a more similar like underhanded hint, sort of like this for Ocarina of Time. And so that's where we sort of get the inference that potentially A.G. Anuma might be referencing a future remake coming out. And so we're just gonna have to wait and see if Ocarina of Time actually does ever get remade in the full HD, whether it's bringing Ocarina of Time 3D into HD, 4K, et cetera, or if it's like a From the Ground remake, sort of like Link's Awakening was, which I do think is possible. In fact, it might be a way to reuse the Breath of the Wild engine in some facets. I think it could actually be repurposed quite well for Ocarina of Time and fans would go absolutely nuts if it did. Obviously a bit more stylized, specifically to the tone of Ocarina of Time, but I clearly think that could be done with the Tears of the Kingdom slash Breath of the Wild engine. Now, all of that being said, there's other stuff that's floated out there as well. You guys know we've referenced the Dr. Circuitoto tweet for a long time, the ZR 2023 that was deleted. He also deleted his tweet back in 2021, which was a reference to a release date for Tears of the Kingdom, which ended up being confirmed by Nintendo like a week later. The funny thing is we've been talking about how ZR 2023 clearly means remake or remaster. One thing one of you guys they'll put out in the one of the comments. I can't remember who it was, but someone said, you know, R could just mean reveal, right? And if you think about it like that, Zelda revealed 2023. I mean, they revealed a Zelda movie. So he very much could have just been referencing the Zelda movie. And that, by the way, that would also make him two for two, by the way, on teasing Zelda announcements. So credit to Dr. Circuitoto for that. That might have been what he referenced. Of course, we aren't sure and we don't know. That's the biggest thing is, it's not like he's coming out and confirming. The other one was very obviously Z2 2022, a very obviously Breath of the Wild 2 2022 release date, which Nintendo did announce like a week later. This is different. This is more like a, he's not really telling us if it's the movie or not. If nothing else happens, then we'll know it was the movie. But I don't know, it's just something to keep in the back of our minds that he might have been teasing something that wasn't a movie. The movie was certainly what Jeff Grubb was teasing. He's already come out and said, oh yeah, this is obviously what my guy was telling me about when he talked early this year about his Zelda reveal before the end of the year that wasn't Cheers of the Kingdom related. So we can sort of maybe set those rumors aside, but another one's out there and I'm only bringing this up just because of the game it is. Look, we all know Zippo, he literally calls his own blog nonsensical ramblings. So say what you want, but he's basically saying Ocarina of Time is coming back in a remake or a remaster. He teased this on his blog. And that is what it is. You don't have to believe anything spotty track record or this and that, right about some things, wrong about a lot of things. But it's interesting when we think about Ocarina of Time potentially being in development in 4K, why this could make sense. For starters, you gotta remember, we haven't probably a long ways until the next major 3D Zelda game. We just got Cheers of the Kingdom this year. Chances are we're probably at least another five years away, you know, at best. If you think about it's 2023, at least five years to the next Zelda game brings us all the way out to 2028. Now they might reveal it in 2026 or 2027. They tend to reveal Zelda games a year or two early compared to a lot of other games, but it doesn't necessarily mean we're gonna get it until 2028. And who knows, what if it takes even longer and we don't see it because it gets delayed for quality assurance or whatever until 2029. The point is Nintendo isn't going to just wait all that time to give us Zelda games. Sure, we could get a Top Town game from Grezzo or something like that, but in terms of wanting to sell a lot of units, Nintendo's still gonna wanna capitalize on the popularity of Zelda. They're not gonna want people to just forget about Zelda for five years and then boom, here's a new game. They're gonna give us stuff. Now some of that stuff will just be Breath of the Wild in 4K or Tears of the Kingdom in 4K. I'm switched to like, I think it's very obvious those two games are gonna get some sort of remastered treatment, some up-resing and other things, 60 FPS and throwing it switched to. Yes, that's gonna happen and that will help, you know, bide some time to the next major Zelda game. But I also don't think that they could just sit on that and wait and do nothing. I do think they need to do something else. And this is where I think Ocarina of Time comes into play where maybe even if the Zelda team isn't the one directly doing it, maybe they are. Maybe it's a team over at Monolith Soft or something. But the idea of bringing back Ocarina of Time in a full 4K version to me is appealing for many, many reasons and I think it makes a lot of sense. One, it's a very popular game from the past. If it's redone in a Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom's stylings in 4K, 60 FPS, they already have the engine for it. They already probably even have some of the assets for it. So the Temple of Time is an example. They would just actually finish the Temple of Time off, like we'd see a complete version of it. And it could actually excite people who played Tears of the Kingdom in Breath of the Wild because it'll be something familiar, yet something completely brand new with a new Link and a new Ganondorf and a new everything. Like it'll feel fresh but familiar and it might be a great way to bring Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom players into the world of Ocarina of Time which has references all over the game in the first place. So I do think that it would be very, very interesting to see that world brought back to life. If you imagine the cutscenes now with full voice acting, re-imagine characters that maybe now have voice acting as well, there could just be a lot of really cool stuff that could be done with this. And now normally you would say, well, if they're gonna do that, you need the full Zelda team on it. And I think if they're just using the engine they currently have, I don't think that's the case because we're not talking about adding the climbing mechanics in and the crazy flying all over the place. And we're talking about taking a game that already exists and basically re-imagining it in this engine. And I just think that is something Nintendo could easily pull off or they could have somebody else do it. Maybe Grezzo, who did Ocarina of Time 3D which was technically a remaster of Ocarina of Time, maybe their task, maybe this is their big project and why we haven't had anything Zelda in us from the wild because they've been tasked with taking Ocarina of Time, paying massive respect to it and getting out a 4K version of it for Nintendo Switch 2. Look, I don't know if this is going to happen. I just think it makes a lot of sense. I think Alnuma teased it, but it could have been nothing. That's the problem with what Alnuma says. Is it a tease for a future game or was he just something popped in his head and he's like, hey, I don't know if people even remember who this guy is. That's one of those things that we don't know because Alnuma's not gonna come right out and be like, yup, we're making that one. Nah, that's not how Nintendo works. It's just like asking Furukawa to come up and say, Furukawa, you're making Nintendo Switch 2, right? Eh, we're always working on new hardware, but Switch 2, eh, we're always making new hardware. Okay, cool. Like, they're not gonna announce things until they're ready to announce it, but I think it is kind of interesting just to pay attention to and dream a little bit about the possibilities of this game. Now, I wanna end this video because it is the 25th anniversary of Ocarina of Time and I just wanna talk about its importance to me. Ocarina of Time came out back in 1998 and I was renting it from good old blockbuster back in the day. If had I rented it for like two years straight, probably would have been cheaper in the end just to buy the damn game. But you know what? My allowance didn't afford me ever to have the money for that, so I rented a lot of games back then. And it took me two years to beat it, mostly because I was renting it and playing it my spare time, right? I was really, really busy. I was in choir and band and playing four sports and I was just super, super busy. So I didn't have like hours and hours on end to play video games, but I was playing video games with almost every spare moment I couldn't find. And Ocarina of Time was like a really important game to me. Not just because of the time in my life, you know, you could think about the 98, I was born in 86, so I was literally 12 years old. So I was right around the age of what Link was supposed to be in the game, right? So it obviously really resonated with me just from an age perspective. And this sense of adventure was also an escape. You know, no offense to any of my family or anything I grew up in a home where there was a lot of fighting, a lot of arguing. And I love my parents and I'm not gonna say I didn't participate in some of that stuff, but sometimes I needed to get away. And Ocarina of Time, it was the first video game I truly played as a child that took me away from that. It put me into the world. I felt like I was immersed in the world. I was Link, I'm in Hyrule. I'm going on these grand adventures and I'm escaping the life that's around me. There was actually a beautiful, similar style YouTube video put out there called Escape at One Point. I don't know if you guys ever caught it about a little girl who was escaping as well, a similar situation with parents arguing and yelling and using things like Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker and using Zelda games to get away from the life that they're in. And it just helped them be at peace. And then even when their parents took away their video game machine, when they went to sleep, they started dreaming that they were in that world. And that was me. And so that really resonated with me. If I could find that, I'll put a link down. I'd love for you guys to watch that as well. It's a bit older now, but it's still, I think the impact of it can really resonate with a lot of us and how we use video games sometimes to escape, whether we're using it as an adult, escape our lives and our bills and other weird things that are going on, the debt we're facing or sicknesses and cancer and all this stuff, or whether it's just the hardships of growing up and dealing with losing friends and family and fighting and bad grades and whatever else you might be dealing with. Ocarina of Time was that game for me. It was the very first time I understood what being immersed in a video game was. So I've been playing video games for many years, but I've never been immersed where I was truly felt like I was part of that world. And that was Ocarina of Time. And Ocarina of Time inspired me so much. I actually started making my very first website back then called Zelda Domain. I made it at geocities.com. And that led to, I actually ran that site for gosh, the next eight, 10 years, wait no, through 2006. So yeah, the next eight years I ran Zelda Domain and actually got to be, at least in my estimation, it's quite popular. Zelda Domain at its peak in 2005, which was right when I was graduating high school, was getting more traffic than my YouTube channel gets today and my YouTube channel gets anywhere from 200 to 500,000 viewers a month. I was getting more viewers than that. I was trending towards a million views a month. And it was quite amazing. And during that time, I was working at Zelda Universe, helping out with their podcast as a news person. I also helped found the Zelda wiki and a lot of other stuff along the ways. I got to know a lot of amazing people in the Zelda community. And then I got hired on by Zelda Informer. You know, my website, my host was taken down through no fault of my own. The host was taken out into the summer of 2006 and I was working on revamping the website and bringing it back with a partner. And then we were approached by Zelda Informer that was opening up in 2007, spinning off from Zelda Universe. And they basically said, hey man, can you come here and run this site and get us going with news? Like we have editorials and stuff, but we don't really know what to do with news. We don't know what to do with guides or walkthroughs or all this stuff. So I came over and joined Zelda Informer as editor-in-chief in 2007. And I remained editor-in-chief of that website all the way up until the Nintendo Switch launched, basically. I was let go in April, April 30th of 2017 was when the site was sold to somebody else and they let me go. But that website at the time that I left was getting five to 10 million views a month. And when I got there was only getting like 200 a month. So I was really there at the very beginning for the most part, helping grow that place into what it eventually became. Enough to be sold for $70,000 at one point. So I definitely had some success there. Now, I didn't get any of that 70,000 but that's a story for a different day. But I came off of Zelda Informer into this YouTube gig. On my exit contract, I negotiated maintaining rights to the Zelda Informer YouTube channel which is this very channel you're watching right now. That's why if you still go to youtube.com slash Zelda Informer, it will bring you right back to this YouTube channel because that's what this channel was. I negotiated getting it. I just had to rebrand the channel, did rebrand it to Nintendo Prime and I haven't looked back since. But in many ways, I look at the success of my channel and all of you guys watching right now and dropping likes and commenting and I love what we're building here and I love where we're going. We have a bright future ahead of this channel. All of us together I think we all have bright futures in our own individual ways. But my channel wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Ocarina of Time. Like it's literally that important to me. So you might hear me talk about how it's not in my top 10 Zelda games and all of this and you guys can call blasphemy and get mad at me all you want. It does not change how important Ocarina of Time is to my life. Not what it meant to me when I was a kid. Not how much it inspired me and not how without that game I might not even be a YouTuber talking to you right now. Ocarina of Time is one of the most important games to come out in my lifetime. Both for me, for the video game industry and for millions of other people. And I will never, never insult this game even though it might not be in my top 10 favorite Zelda games anymore. The only reason I even know about those other Zelda games are thanks to Ocarina of Time. So thank you Nintendo, thank you Miyamoto, Aonuma and everyone else for that incredible game. Hopefully it comes back here in 4K on Switch 2. Happy anniversary. 25 years is a long time man. Quarter of a century baby. Catch you guys in the next video.