You’re playing Tears of the Kingdom, right? Everyone seems to be playing it. Even people who I didn’t even know were into video games have asked me if it’s as good as they were hoping. I was on the BBC News at Six talking about it, which delighted me because, for many, many years, the BBC didn’t pay attention to video games unless someone had claimed they were destroying children’s lives or deemed them opaquely responsible for a violent event. I had a fun conversation about it on NPR’s Consider This. I’ve written about five articles about it in the past week and, apparently, I still haven’t exhausted the topic.
It is pleasantly surprising that the world at large has taken such an interest in Tears of the Kingdom, because for most of the 30-odd years that I’ve been playing Zelda games, they have been the nerdy connoisseur’s choice from the Nintendo canon. When I was a teenager, the only other people I knew who loved Zelda were fellow geeky kids who were into fantasy novels. A huge proportion of game developers and critics love Zelda, but the games have never been bestsellers. Indeed, before Breath of the Wild, the leading Zelda game was the 2006 emo-era classic Twilight Princess (my least favourite, don’t @ me), which sold around 9m copies.
