If you pay close attention to the games industry you might have noticed that Nintendo released a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time last week. And if you went so far as to buy a copy of the Switch 2 release, you find yourself in the company of over five million others. The all-new version of the N64 classic has sold an extraordinary 5.2 million copies in its first four days on sale, bringing it extraordinary close to the original version’s lifetime sales.
In 1998, the Nintendo 64 version of Ocarina of Time literally broke records, receiving the beer company’s accolade for most pre-orders of all time, at 325,000. In its first week it sold a million copies, reaching 2.5 million by three weeks. It was only outsold that year by GoldenEye, and two years later had sold a mighty 7.6 million copies worldwide. All very impressive stuff. And then the Switch 2 remake suggests it hold its pint of Guinness.
Nintendo has announced that the Ocarina remake sold 5.2 million copies worldwide in just its first four days, making it the best-selling Switch 2 game across that timespan so far. It also means it’s sold 70 percent as many copies as the original ever did, in 0.5 percent of the time. Crikey. With three more days to go before its first week on sale is up, it seems pretty likely that it’ll match the N64 version’s sales in time for the weekend.
Nintendo’s figures include both digital and physical copies, making them more accurate than the somewhat guestimated numbers from tracking companies and chart compilers, and Nintendo suggests 5.2 million is rounding down.
Music to Nintendo’s ears
You might assume that these modern figures are largely driven by the huge growth in the total gaming market in 2026 when compared with 1998. I sure did. But digging into the numbers it ends up looking even more impressive. The N64 was two years old by the time Ocarina was released, and that console sold a total of 32.93 million units across its entire lifetime. The Switch 2 after a year-and-a-half has sold 26.35 million units. While there are no official numbers on how many of those N64s had sold by November 1998, it’s reasonable to assume the numbers weren’t wildly different. In that light, the Switch 2 Ocarina sales are all the more stunning, and also speak to a very different audience attitude to the release of new games, with far bigger up-front spikes and more diminishing tails.
Either way, there’s money in them their Hyrulean hills, and this will only drive Nintendo further to remake all those classic Zelda titles, and hopefully use the new Ocarina art and engine to craft something new.
