The Little Goose of Time

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today, November 5, the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time came out on the Nintendo Switch 2, and thanks to a very generous coworker who let me try it on his Switch 2, I got to play it on day one. So this one is for him, and for a game that is almost exactly 28 years old.

Why do people love it so much?

The original came out on the Nintendo 64 in November 1998, and it holds a record that has never been broken. It is the only game ever to get a Metacritic score of 99, making it the highest-rated video game of all time.

The Nintendo 64, where Ocarina of Time first came out in 1998. Photo by Evan-Amos, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

A lot of that comes from how much it invented. It was one of the first games to figure out how a sword fight should work in 3D, and its solution, called Z-targeting, lets you lock the camera onto an enemy and circle around it. That idea is now in just about every action game, along with its context-sensitive buttons that change what they do depending on where you are. Add a huge world to explore, a story that jumps seven years between a child and an adult Link, and music you play yourself on an in-game ocarina, and you get a game that an entire generation grew up on.

Why remake this one?

For the series’ 40th anniversary, Nintendo could have remade anything, including the very first Legend of Zelda from 1986. Instead it picked Ocarina of Time, the first 3D Zelda and the game that defined what 3D Zelda would be. According to reporting on the remake, producer Eiji Aonuma chose it partly because many of the current staff had limited familiarity with the older games, which I love. Remaking the classic is also a way of teaching it to a new team.

The remake keeps the original game but rebuilds almost everything around it, with completely overhauled visuals, voiced cutscenes, expanded dialogue, orchestral music and reworked camera and controls. Critics seem to agree it worked. It currently has a Metacritic score of 96, making it the best-reviewed game of 2026 so far, although the 1998 original still holds the top spot.

Why does Zelda have such a huge fan database?

Part of what keeps people obsessed with Zelda is that the games are connected in a way that is genuinely confusing. In 2011, Nintendo published Hyrule Historia, an official history book that finally revealed the timeline, and it turned out that Ocarina of Time is where everything splits. Depending on how the game ends, history branches into three separate timelines, one where Link returns to his childhood, one where the adult Link’s world continues without him, and one where Link actually loses to Ganondorf. Every later game sits somewhere on one of these three branches, and fans have spent decades building wikis, maps and timelines to keep track of it all. Ocarina of Time is basically the root of the entire family tree.

Wait, what is an ocarina?

An ocarina is a small, egg-shaped wind instrument, a kind of vessel flute where you blow into a hollow chamber instead of a tube. People have made instruments like this for thousands of years, including in pre-Columbian South America.

A ceramic ocarina from the Carchi culture of the northern Andes, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

The modern version, and the name, come from Italy. In 1853, a 17-year-old in the town of Budrio near Bologna named Giuseppe Donati is said to have made his first one, and he called it ocarina, from the local Bolognese word for “little goose”. Look at one from the side and you can see why. So the full title of the game is, technically, The Legend of Zelda: The Little Goose of Time.

A modern Italian-style ocarina. The little goose shape is hard to miss once you know it. Photo by Stepla, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 de.

No Switch? No problem (sort of)

What blew my mind is how fast emulators caught up. Emulators are programs that pretend to be a console, and the newest ones now target the Switch 2 and ship builds for Apple’s ARM-based Macs out of the box. Eglantine and Lichii, both open-source and both still very experimental, offer official builds for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 15 or later, and another project called nxnative has shown Donkey Kong Bananza running at 60 frames per second on an M4 Pro Mac. And the Ocarina of Time remake was booting on Lichii within hours of its release, on the very same day. To be fair, it is not really playable yet, with crashes, missing shaders, overexposed lighting and big frame rate drops, but a game running on a completely different kind of chip on day one is still wild.

There is a big catch though. Emulators themselves are not illegal, but playing a game on one still means using your own copy of the game and your own console’s encryption keys, and downloading either from the internet is piracy. Nintendo also takes this very seriously. In 2024 the team behind Yuzu, the most popular Switch emulator at the time, settled with Nintendo for $2.4 million and shut down, and the projects that came after it keep getting takedown notices. So yes, the technology is there, but the safest and easiest way to play is still the way I did it, by borrowing a friend’s Switch 2.