Booth Feature at Nintendo Live 2024 Sydney Sparks Zelda Timeline Hysteria, Misinformation

On August 31st, Nintendo Live 2024 kicked off in Sydney, Australia. Amidst all that the event offered — including live presentations, photo ops, and tournaments — the most noteworthy feature for the wider internet came from Nintendo Live’s Tears of the Kingdom booth. In addition to gameplay stations and photo opportunities with the much-publicized Tears of the Kingdom statues, the booth contained a Zelda “History” graphic, which displayed every mainline title within the official Zelda timeline.

Zelda Dungeon Forum Administrator Jimmu snapped the following pictures of the booth on the first day of the event.

The timeline graphic was swiftly reported on as an “updated” version of the timeline that allegedly confirmed that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom exist in their own continuity, away from all other Zelda games. The image spread like wildfire on social media, where people were quick to point out that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom aren’t connected together.

Nearly every major gaming website grabbed onto this story and reported on the booth feature as if it presented brand-new information – it  did not, however.

The image shown that day depicts the Zelda timeline exactly as it has existed since 2023 on the History page of Nintendo’s Japanese Zelda portal, which was last updated to coincide with the release of Tears of the Kingdom. Not only that, but Breath of the Wild had been sectioned away from the rest of the timeline by a dividing line since August 2018, indicating that these games exist in a yet-undefined future of the timeline. Taking all this into account, the booth feature looks to be directly repurposed from the official Zelda portal’s History page, retaining both its content and format.

As for the claim that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom aren’t shown to be connected, in Volume 9 of Nintendo’s “Ask the Developer” series from last year, Zelda Series Producer Eiji Aonuma confirmed explicitly that Tears of the Kingdom is a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild:

Aonuma: “This title, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, is a direct sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which released in 2017. Once again, it takes place in the vast land of Hyrule after the conclusion of the previous game.”

To put any doubt to rest, the timeline on the Zelda portal does in fact show these titles as connected. It would seem that the missing line was an error in the presentation of the Nintendo Live timeline, which also notably misspells Tri Force Heroes.

As for the ambiguous placement of these games at the end of the timeline, this week’s incident is far from the first time Nintendo has declined to offer insight into their decision making on this topic. Aonuma has held a position since Breath of the Wild‘s release that it’s better not to make clarifications on where the games should go in the timeline moving forward.

He made that stance clear in Breath of the Wild – Creating a Champion:

Aonuma: “We want players to be able to continue having fun imagining this world even after they are finished with the game, so, this time, we decided that we would avoid making clarifications. I hope that everyone can find their own answer, in their own way.”

There is nothing new about the presentation of the timeline today. Leaving the placement of Breath of the Wild (and Tears of the Kingdom, by virtue of being its sequel) ambiguous has been par for the course since 2017. There is also no validity to the claim that Nintendo’s latest open-world installments do not connect.

That all being said, I won’t pretend that this isn’t a topic that can get tricky to navigate while reporting. For instance, there are statements from Aonuma and Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom Director Hidemaro Fujibayashi from an interview with Famitsu in 2017 where they claim that Breath of the Wild “is at the end” of one of the timeline’s three splits:

Aonuma: “Well of course it’s at the very end. But, I get what you’re asking, it’s which timeline is it the end of?”

Fujibayashi: “That’s… up to the player’s imagination, isn’t it?”

Since the release of Tears of the Kingdom, it has not been clarified whether this is still true, or if Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom now exist in a separate rebooted timeline of events. Fans were heavily leaning toward the latter as the Nintendo Live timeline began making the rounds, largely due to actual new timeline information from earlier that week.

Coincidentally, Tears of the Kingdom Master Works released in Japan on August 30th, a day before Nintendo Live 2024 began. It didn’t take long for an image of the timeline within the book to surface, and to quickly get translated (since removed due to a copyright claim). The content within, as expected, gave no further hints on how Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom would fit alongside the other games. It’s very much up to interpretation on how to contextualize the information within the book. Nevertheless, its publication sparked heated debate about the timeline, where, more than ever, people began to believe Zelda lore was being rebooted due to the disregard of other games. These discussions certainly primed the explosive reactions to the image from the Nintendo Live booth.

It would seem that a lot of gaming websites decided to follow suit in a reactionary manner, without actually knowing about, or properly researching, the topic. This leads to my ultimate point: gaming journalism seems to be lacking people who are specialists on certain game topics.

While it’s good to have generalists within a team structure to ensure bases are covered on a variety of tasks, there is undeniable value in also having people who have a high level of expertise on one particular subject, or at least in contracting out to get that specialization. This is commonplace in nearly every workforce, and gaming journalism isn’t a stranger to it either. My impression of this recent news cycle regarding the Zelda timeline is that a lot of websites do not have someone on staff who specializes in topics of Zelda lore, didn’t contract out to get the proper expertise to tackle the subject, and didn’t reach out to get consultation to fact-check in-house coverage.

At the time of writing, most websites have not updated their erroneous reporting, which is disappointing to see. That said, there has been some refreshingly accurate coverage on this story. For example, there are fans who have informed others that the timeline from Nintendo Live isn’t new information, as seen in the posts below.

The one upside to these accounts completely misunderstanding this as “news” is that we’re going to get a few more interviews of Aonuma and Fujibayashi talking about the timeline soon pic.twitter.com/45oX9scsnj

— Ike ▴ 🍉 (@scorchedprince) September 3, 2024

That’s actually the same timeline they’ve had for the past year on the official Japanese website, with the line originally separating BoTW (and later adding ToTK) as reported by Famitsu in 2018.https://t.co/Nf2GGOgqmP pic.twitter.com/0Uc6ZqPLi1

— Matt (@makgameadv) August 31, 2024

Nintendo Life was one of the earliest sites to point out that there was nothing new about the timeline shown in Sydney. And The Gamer published an article that dug into the Tears of the Kingdom Master Works timeline, which is new information that’s come to light recently. While I don’t agree with that article’s assertion that Nintendo is confirming a lore reboot with the book (I think it’s intentionally vague to allow for theorizing opportunities), I still have to give props to them for not following the lead of other sources.

YouTube’s Zeltik released a video recently that explained quite well why the Zelda timeline from Nintendo Live isn’t new information. Additionally, in response to Zeltik‘s video, IGN updated their own coverage to reflect that the timeline shown at Nintendo Live was indeed not new information, which is nice to see.

These are just a few sites that have reported this story well, or have made updates to remain factual. Hopefully others will follow suit in the coming days.

As this media frenzy calms, hopefully reflection will be done so that reporting on these topics can be more accurate in the future. There’s always plenty of Zelda theories that get picked up and reported on by various websites, and timeline discourse always sparks up year round. There is interest for these topics, so naturally it would make sense to invest in people who are informed on the subjects to report on them.

To conclude, we extend the question to our readers: Have you felt disappointed by the reporting of the Zelda timeline lately, or are you indifferent? Do you find this type of discourse to also be an issue with lore topics of other gaming franchises? How could future reporting strive to be better in this regard? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: Nintendo, Zeltik

Image Credit: Jimmu

Works Cited (as erroneous): Vooks, Kotaku, Forbes, Gamesradar, Eurogamer, ScreenRant, GameSpot