Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Players Cover Linkin Park as Sales Pass 5.2 Million

The clip doing the rounds this week is Link working through Linkin Park’s “In the End” on his ocarina. Behind it comes a queue of others: the Titanic theme, a Final Fantasy tearjerker, a discount-store jingle rebranded for the “Hyrule branch.” The shorthand version of the story is that Nintendo‘s remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has finally let players play anything they like. That is not quite what happened, and what did happen is more interesting.

Link has always been able to play freely. What the remake changed is the instrument itself, which now looks, reads and listens like a real one. That single design decision has turned a quiet feature of the original into a cover band on social media, in the same week the game started breaking sales records for Nintendo.

The ocarina could always do this

In the 1998 original, pressing the ocarina’s button paused the world and let Link play at will on five buttons, one note each. Zelda Wiki’s documentation of the instrument notes that two more buttons pushed the held note a semitone up or down, and that tilting the control stick bent the pitch by up to a full tone or added vibrato, for a range of an octave and a half. The game only stepped in when the last few notes matched a song Link had learned. Everything else was simply music.

So IGN’s description of the trend as “the fact that you can now play any tune you like” gives the remake credit for something the original already did. The tune-playing is old. The novelty is that the covers are suddenly easy to read, copy and share.

What Nintendo actually rebuilt

The remake’s ocarina has ten holes instead of the classic seven, and Link uses the proper fingering for each note, according to Zelda Wiki. The on-screen staff now has the correct number of lines for a treble clef, with each note sitting where a musician would expect to find it. It reads like an art-direction detail, but it closes the gap between the instrument on screen and written music, which is exactly the gap a cover has to cross.

Around that sits a small music-education kit. A songbook opens mid-performance to remind players which buttons they need. Zelda Notes, the companion service in the Nintendo Switch App, adds a Play Ocarina mode in which points are exchanged for music scores, plus a way to play the ocarina freely from a phone screen, Nintendo Everything reports. With the option switched on, players can hum into the console’s microphone or play a real instrument, and the game judges the relative pitch between notes rather than demanding perfect tuning.

Two details complicate the viral framing, though. The microphone is built for the game’s own songs: Zelda Wiki describes it measuring intervals to work out which Song is being played. The covers flooding social feeds are button work, as the notes StevenxTCG posted after his Linkin Park clip took off make clear, a string of L, A and R presses, some paired with Up. And the playable ocarina IGN presents as an official Nintendo release is an officially licensed Hori product, the Electric Ocarina of Time, sold at $49.99 with Auto-Play and Free Play modes, according to Notebookcheck and Zelda Wiki.

A repertoire built on melody

The song choices tell their own story. IGN’s roundup runs from game music, including “To Zanarkand,” the Final Fantasy VII main theme, Kingdom Hearts’ “Dearly Beloved,” BB’s theme from Death Stranding and “Starlit Journey” from Kirby Air Riders, to film scores: the Titanic theme and Howard Shore’s “Concerning Hobbits,” inevitably renamed “Concerning Hylians.” Someone answered the Linkin Park clip with “Macarena of Time.” Japanese players have gravitated to shop jingles such as the supermarket tune “Yobikomi-kun,” which IGN puts down to simple melodies that suit the ocarina, and some tried the national anthem.

Almost all of it is melody you can hum, the kind of line that survives being squeezed onto a small instrument. Video game lecturer T. Wade Langer, posting a duet of Link and Cloud on the Final Fantasy VII theme, summed up the mood: “I want music minigames in every game now.”

The sales behind the noise

The covers are riding a very large wave. Nintendo said the remake sold more than 5.2 million units worldwide in its first four days after its November 5 launch, including 810,000 in Japan. The company’s wording is careful: the record is “the highest global sales for any Nintendo-published Nintendo Switch 2 game in its first four days.” Eurogamer’s headline calls it the fastest-selling Switch 2 game outright; its own report concedes the release only covers Nintendo-published titles and argues the wider claim “presumably holds” because Nintendo’s games dominate the platform.

Nintendo Life notes that four days were enough to pass Donkey Kong Bananza’s lifetime 5.05 million, making the remake the second-biggest seller on Switch 2 behind Mario Kart World at 16.48 million. The Nintendo 64 original sold 7.6 million in total, by the Video Game Sales wiki figure Nintendo Life cites. In the UK, the physical launch was the second biggest in Zelda history, 35 percent ahead of Breath of the Wild and roughly half of Tears of the Kingdom’s first week, Nintendo Everything reports. No digital and physical split has been published yet.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is out now on Nintendo Switch 2. Microphone input has to be switched on in the settings, and a Practice Mode lets players check their notes without triggering a song. Hori’s ocarina runs on three AA batteries, which are not included.

The Nintendo 64 ocarina could already carry “In the End.” The remake is the first version that hands Link the sheet music.

Tags: nintendo, Nintendo Switch 2, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Linkin Park, video game remakes