Nintendo closed its June 9 Direct with the long-rumoured one: a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Switch 2. IGN's recap describes the reveal as a brief look at Link asleep in his hut, and Nintendo's trailer went up the same day. Within hours, anyone who'd ever heard the first few notes of the ocarina had an opinion.
We don't know much about the Ocarina of Time remake yet beyond the platform and that short tease. What we do know is that it has a harder job than most remakes, because people don't remember Ocarina as software. They remember the room they played it in, the save file shared with a sibling, and the first time Hyrule Field opened up and felt enormous.
What Nintendo has confirmed so far
- A full remake of Ocarina of Time, not a port.
- Coming to Nintendo Switch 2.
- Revealed at the end of the June 9, 2026 Nintendo Direct, with footage of Link waking in Kokiri Forest.
No release date, no word on how much the structure changes, and no confirmation of whether the Master Quest remix comes along. Everything past that list is guesswork, including ours.
Why remaking Ocarina of Time is so hard
A remake has to fix things and keep things at the same time. Memory makes that harder, because memory has already done its own edit. It kept the feeling and quietly dropped the friction: the camera fighting you in tight rooms, the three days stuck in the Water Temple, textures that looked better in your head than they did on a CRT in 1998.
So people want contradictory things from the remake. Some want the game they remember. Some want the game that was actually there. Some want the game Nintendo would make if it were designing Ocarina from scratch in 2026. Those are three different requests, and one remake can't satisfy all of them.
Nintendo has been here before. Ocarina of Time 3D on the 3DS in 2011 cleaned up the visuals and made the Iron Boots less of a chore without changing the shape of the game. Link's Awakening on Switch in 2019 rebuilt a Game Boy game in a new art style and kept the map almost exactly the same. A full Switch 2 remake could go much further than either.
Two audiences, two different first times
It's tempting to ask whether the remake is for returning fans or new players. The good ones work for both, just differently.
Returning players will be comparing. You know the path, so the pleasure is in noticing what's different: a rearranged music cue, a room that feels bigger, an enemy that moves in a way your hands don't expect. You're checking the new game against a half-reliable memory of the old one.
New players are the harder audience, because reverence doesn't carry them. If the pacing drags, the puzzles feel old-fashioned or the combat still works like 1998, the name on the box only helps for so long. The remake has to make someone who's never played it understand why an empty field felt huge, why a day-night cycle felt like magic, and why a six-note melody could open a door.
Those are design problems, not nostalgia problems, and they're the part we're most curious about.
Bigger isn't the point
It would be easy to take Switch 2 hardware and make Hyrule Field ten times larger. We hope Nintendo doesn't. Part of Ocarina's pull was that its world was small enough to learn by heart and still felt mysterious. A lot of modern open worlds are enormous and hard to remember. Ocarina was smaller than everyone's memory of it and it stuck anyway.
The ideal version is confident enough to change what needs changing (camera, menus, the item-swapping in that temple) and patient enough to leave some of the old strangeness alone. The forest doesn't need to explain itself, and Hyrule Field doesn't need icons.
Before it comes out, write down what you remember
This is a good moment to jot down your history with the original while it's still yours, before the remake overwrites it. Did you finish it on the N64? Play the 3DS version? Bounce off the Water Temple and never go back? Watch an older sibling play from the floor with no controller?
Your Nintendo account can't record any of that. When the remake arrives, it'll be interesting to compare what you remembered with what's actually there. We keep ours in Perthro as a short review against the original, with the remake on the plan-to-play list. A sticky note works too. If this has you thinking about other old games that are due a return, our piece on what a Nintendo Switch Online classic is for picks up the same thread.
