The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom trailer gets a perfect N64 demake

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the sequel to Breath of the Wild, is one of the most hotly anticipated video games in recent years. And with the popularity of taking visually stunning new video games and “demaking” them into old console versions (like Elden Ring), it was only a matter of time before the new Zelda trailer got the same treatment.

And it’s everything you want it to be. Check it out.

If you’re like me and just finished playing Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask on Nintendo Switch Online, then you know just how pitch-perfect this demake is. It’s the exact boxy-ness that Link needs to be and the background gradients look exactly like all of the walls of rocks that were in Hyrule Field.

Just imagine if you watched this trailer in 1998 and saw these visuals, your mind would be blown like when you turned on Ocarina of Time for the very first time. It’s so funny to think how this used to be the height of gaming graphics, the pinnacle of everything.

Thankfully, we are in an age where graphics are mind-blowingly good and people are remaking Kakariko Village in Unreal Engine 5 and it looks like real life. It’s always so much fun to see just how creative the gaming community can get with these things. Retro-style games are all the rage, too, so seeing something goofy like this fits right in.

We still don’t know much about the plot of Tears of the Kingdom, aside from it being the sequel to Breath of the Wild. We do know that it’s “tears” as in crying, not “tears” as in, say, tears in the space-time continuum and we’re traveling back to a Skyward Sword era of Zelda. Which would make sense with the air/sky travel we’ve seen in the latest trailer.

We’ll also potentially see some subterranean areas as well if the very first trailer is still true to where the game’s development ended up heading.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom releases on May 12, 2023, so we have plenty of time to theorize what players can expect!