I made this ahead of the Ocarina of Time remake which comes out in 17 days. I remember the feeling of playing it as a kid but I hadn’t kept up with the story so I built a timeline to catch up before the Door of Time reopens.

Nintendo’s own timeline is the authority here (Hyrule Historia and their chronicle page). The fun part was rethinking how to visualize it. It branches at the end of Ocarina into three eras depending on whether Link wins or loses, so each era is its own thread on the cloth. The threads meet again much later with Breath of the Wild.

I had a lot of help from Claude. I’d often thought about building things like this but never found the time between the day job and the rest of life.

What’s the word for trying to do cluster analysis on what is actually randomly distributed data? The games do have obvious similarities and sometimes refer to each other, but they’re independent events.

This is a lovely website, but the premise is entirely incorrect (that there's anything you need to know going in), and also spoils details from the game which this is supposedly background for.

Nobody should be discussing the timeline before playing the games. And not from some kind of purity perspective, but just because it's nerd shit that you won't get anything out of until you do. I really enjoy thinking and talking about the timeline, but I'm under no illusion that it's anything more than after-the-fact fanfiction.

I played Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time to conclusion. I haven't really played any Zelda games since then, except maybe for a few minutes for a few of them.

I'm a little surprised to hear that Ocarina of Time is getting a remake. I take it it's going to be a Switch 2 exclusive?

Don't forget to include:

- Link: The Faces of Evil

- Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon

- Link's Crossbow Training

- the various Hyrule Warriors games

Good luck! :)

This is really fun! Great design!

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There's a story?