Ocarina of Time is a game where you play songs to bend time, so it’s fitting that Nintendo’s plan for the series’ 40th anniversary is mostly about music. The Switch 2 remake lands Nov. 5 with a rerecorded orchestral score, and Nintendo is sending the series’ music on a world tour next year.
The rebuild is not a light touch-up. Series producer Eiji Aonuma showed the first gameplay in September during Nintendo’s 40th Anniversary Direct, Hypebeast reported. The 1998 adventure now has overhauled visuals, fully voiced cutscenes, expanded dialogue and reworked camera and movement controls. The score has been rerecorded as symphonic orchestral music, a big change from the Nintendo 64’s compressed audio.
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Nintendo of America president Devon Pritchard laid out the rest of the anniversary to Variety on Oct. 9: the remake, a live concert series and a live-action Zelda movie made with Sony. The movie is set for theaters on April 30, 2027, per Nintendo’s anniversary site. Variety noted Ocarina is the one high-profile game willing to go up against the November window of GTA VI.
a celebration that everyone can come in and join
Devon Pritchard, president of Nintendo of America, Variety
The concerts
The Legend of Zelda 40th Anniversary Concert will mix, in the tour site’s words, nostalgic tunes and modern melodies from across the series. The North American leg starts Feb. 22, 2027, with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Center, followed by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall on April 3 and 4 and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at Hamer Hall on May 13. Ticket sales were scheduled to start Sept. 30, with dates varying by venue. The Chicago and Melbourne shows read as sold out on the tour site at the time of writing, and dates in France, Germany, Italy and Spain are being planned.
A preview arrived on Oct. 3, when Nintendo of America posted an orchestral Triforce Medley. The arrangement was written for the anniversary and themed around Wisdom, Power and Courage, the virtues of the Triforce, with a run of songs from the series.
The sequence is the plan. The game ships first, the concerts start in February and the film follows in April, which gives Nintendo a run of Zelda events from November through spring. Chicago opens the tour on Feb. 22, and the Triforce Medley is an early taste of the anniversary’s orchestral sound.
