The general consensus among gamers seems to be that Nintendo won E3. While we’ve been made privy to a ton of new announcements over the past few days, none really compare to Nintendo’s unveiling of Banjo Kazooie in Smash Ultimate, the disclosure of some actual Animal Crossing gameplay on the Switch, and, of course, the revelation that a direct sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is currently in the works.
The leak only came out hours before Nintendo was slated to take the stage in Los Angeles, of course, so it wasn’t the most disrupting accidental divulgence to occur in the history of the conference. That said, it did take some of the gusto out of the company’s presentation of the remaster, and they were robbed of their major Keanu-Reeves-announcing-the-Cyberpunk-release-date moment, but these things happen.
What’s more, it’s hard to get upset about such a relatively trivial blunder when there’s much bigger Zelda-related news coming out of the convention. Sure, a remaster of a decades-old original GameBoy game is fantastic news, but, come on, the announcement of a BotW sequel blew that totally out of the water.
This whole event sort of smacks of a similar blunder committed by Walmart Canada in 2018 when they accidentally leaked the existence of Bethesda’s Rage 2 — as well as several other games — before it was even officially announced. That was bad, and, quite honestly, things haven’t improved much for Bethesda in terms of E3 debuts since then, but that’s another story for another time.
It’s also worth considering just how fortunate the Zelda franchise has been on the Nintendo Switch. Typically, a Nintendo console will only see one mainline Zelda release, two if they’re lucky. While the Link’s Awakening remaster doesn’t quite count as a new game, seeing something like this from a company that tends to be very protective of their old properties is exciting. Zelda fans should have their hands full fairly soon, and this is a major step up from what we got on the Wii U, which, save for an extremely late BotW release and the occasional eShop addition, was literally nothing.
Link’s Awakening will be available on Nintendo Switch on September 20.
