In stark contrast to the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake on the Nintendo Switch 2, a game that everyone in the world knew about before its official announcement, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was such a secret that, according to two ex-PR leads, “less than 10 people” at Nintendo of America knew about it before it was announced at E3 2019.
This comes directly from former Nintendo of America PR managers Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang (via GamesRadar), who are now perhaps better known by their YouTube handle Kit & Krysta. The two ex-Nintendo PR managers left Nintendo in 2022 and have been spilling info about the company’s inner workings on their YouTube channel ever since, but were, obviously, a lot better at keeping Nintendo’s secrets during their employment.
Case in point, according to the duo, “less than 10 people” at Nintendo of America were aware of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s existence before its trailer dropped at the final E3 in 2019.
Funnily enough, according to Ellis, even his own boss was not privy to the reveal, as the list of those who were informed of its announcement before it was revealed at E3 only consisted of “a couple of the Japan liaison people,” former Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser, of course, and Ellis.
According to Ellis, he was handpicked as one of the lucky few who were informed of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s existence due to his PR and marketing work on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Well, maybe “lucky” is the wrong word to use here, because as Ellis went on to reveal, the secretive nature of the project resulted in his workload massively increasing.
“Initially I thought, well, there’s not that much for me to do,” Ellis explained. “But, as we got closer and closer to [E3 2019] it became clear that I actually had a ton to do, because… y’know there was this big communications team–this E3 machine, cranking out materials[…]it became clear that I had to do all of these different teams’ jobs in secret.”
Even Yang humorously recalled that Ellis’ own boss was standing next to her during the games’ announcement, and was just as shocked as she was to see it for the first time. Personally, it’s kind of a shame that, in the age of video game leaks that we currently live in, we rarely get treated to big reveals like this anymore. Just imagine how hype it would have been if we heard about Ocarina of Time’s remake for the first time at the Nintendo Direct it was officially revealed in, instead of via NateTheHate’s podcast.