Nintendo is remaking The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2, and the company says the game will arrive in 2026. Link, this time as a minifigure in a recent Lego set, now sits at the center of a return to one of Nintendo’s most influential adventures.
The announcement gives fans a date to watch because Nintendo tied the release to the Zelda series’ 40th anniversary, turning the remake into more than another revisit of a classic. The original game launched in 1998 for the Nintendo 64 and helped move Zelda from a top-down world into full 3D, making its return on the next Switch a natural focal point for the series’ milestone year.
Nintendo has not shown much of the remake yet, but what was visible points to a complete overhaul of the original look. It appears to move far away from the visual style of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which is enough to make this feel less like a tidy refresh and more like a major reimagining. That matters because the last few Zelda rereleases have taken different paths, from The Wind Waker, Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess getting HD or DX updates to Link’s Awakening on Switch arriving in 2019 with a bold new graphical style.
Ocarina of Time has already been through this cycle before. Nintendo re-released it for the GameCube in 2003, bundled Master Quest with that version as a pre-order bonus for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and later brought out a 3DS remake in 2011 with stereoscopic 3D effects and quality-of-life improvements. Even with that history, the new Switch 2 version stands out because Nintendo is offering only a brief look now, while keeping the details of what has changed, how it plays and when in 2026 it will land still under wraps.
The timing also gives the remake extra weight. Nintendo and Lego earlier in 2026 released a 1,003-piece The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Final Battle set priced at $129.99, and a live-action Zelda movie from director Wes Ball is scheduled for May 7, 2027. For now, the remake is the clearest signal that Nintendo is preparing to spend 2026 leaning hard on Zelda’s past while leaving the biggest questions about this version of Ocarina of Time for later.
