It’s the end of 1998, and Ocarina of Time has just been released. It took three years to make, it was delayed several times, and it’s about to be called one of the greatest games ever made.

At Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto asks Eiji Aonuma a question. The team has spent years building 3D models for Ocarina, so if they reused them, could they make a whole new Zelda game in one year? That question is how Majora’s Mask was born. It wasn’t planned as a grand sequel; it was what Nintendo could build with the Ocarina of Time it had just finished.

Twelve years later, in June 2011, Nintendo released Ocarina of Time again, rebuilt for the Nintendo 3DS, and almost immediately, Miyamoto went back to Aonuma with another suggestion: let’s do Majora’s Mask next.

Now it’s 2026. On November 5th, Ocarina of Time comes back for a third time, rebuilt from the ground up on Switch 2. In the weeks leading up to it, Nintendo has quietly filled its apps, music service, and online profiles with Majora’s Mask.

Here’s what’s interesting, though. Every time people ask whether Majora’s Mask is getting a remake, they treat it as its own decision, a question of whether Nintendo thinks the game is popular enough or the timing is right. But that’s never been how Majora’s Mask happens. Twice now, it followed a rebuilt Ocarina of Time, and both times the reasons were practical: the models existed, the team understood the game, and unfinished business remained.

So today I want to go through what Nintendo’s own developers said about making Majora’s Mask, twice, and why that history points so clearly to Termina being next. I also want to look at the part of that history that suggests it could take longer than any of us would like.

Before we go on, welcome back. I’m Tom, and this is Triforce Times. Here, we dive deep into The Legend of Zelda: its design, its lore, and everything Nintendo leaves unexplained. If that’s your kind of thing, consider subscribing. Members get exclusive Zelda videos, early access to new content, and an invite to our community Discord, link below. Let’s get into it.

NINTENDO IS POINTING AT TERMINA

Let’s start with what Nintendo has done this month, because there’s a fair amount. On October 4th, the Zelda collectable cards in the Nintendo Today app switched over to a Majora’s Mask set. A new card appears daily, each with a quiz question, and correct answers earn medals you can trade for wallpapers or cards you missed. The same day, Majora’s Mask profile icons appeared in Missions and Rewards on Switch and are available until October 23rd. On October 9th, the original Majora’s Mask soundtrack arrived on Nintendo Music.

None of that is big on its own. Nintendo runs promotions like this for anniversaries all the time, and Majora’s Mask turns twenty-six this month; it was released in North America on October 26th, 2000.

Fans have been here before. After Ocarina of Time 3D was released in 2011, a fan campaign called Operation Moonfall pushed Nintendo to remake Majora’s Mask the same way, and an Operation Moonfall 2.0 petition is running now. The demand has never been in question. The question is whether Nintendo has a reason to do it beyond fans asking.

I don’t think the best evidence is anything Nintendo has done this October. It’s what Nintendo’s own developers said about the last two times they made Majora’s Mask. Look at how this game was made in 2000 and remade in 2015: the same pattern shows up both times, and Nintendo has just set it up again.

MAKE IT IN A YEAR

In 2015, Nintendo’s then-president Satoru Iwata sat down with Aonuma and the team behind Majora’s Mask 3D for an Iwata Asks interview. It’s one of the most candid conversations Nintendo has published about a Zelda game, and it opens with how the original came to exist.

After Ocarina of Time, Aonuma wasn’t meant to be making a new game at all. Nintendo planned Master Quest, a harder version of Ocarina for the 64DD disk drive add-on, and Aonuma was handed the job: take Ocarina’s dungeons, rework them, and make a new game from them. The trouble was that he’d helped build those dungeons believing they were the best the team could make, and he couldn’t bring himself to take them apart. So, in secret, he started building new dungeons instead, and he found that far more fun. Eventually he worked up the courage to ask Miyamoto whether he could make a whole new game. Miyamoto said yes, on one condition: it had to be done in a year.

Iwata points out that it took three years to make Ocarina of Time. Aonuma’s response to being asked for a full Zelda game in a third of the time was, in his words, to hold his head in his hands. What saved him was Yoshiaki Koizumi, who was working on a plan for a different game, one where you’d play through a small world over and over again. Ocarina already had a system for time passing, with day turning to night, so Koizumi offered a deal: he’d help if he could use that time system to build a game where you replay the same stretch of time.

That’s where the three-day cycle comes from, and at first it wasn’t three days; it was a whole week. The team cut it down because a week was too much to remember. If every townsperson does something different every day, a seven-day loop means tracking who’s where each day for a whole week. Three days was the size a player could learn, and, as Iwata notes, also the size a team could fill in a year. They squeezed a week’s worth of planning into three days, which is a big part of why Clock Town feels so dense.

Then there are the masks. Aonuma explains that because Ocarina took so long to make, the team had put in ideas that never reached their full potential, and one of them was the Happy Mask Salesman. In Ocarina, wearing a mask changes how some characters react to Link, and that’s about as far as it went. In Majora’s Mask, the team asked what would happen if the masks changed Link himself. That gave them Deku Link to fly, Goron Link to roll across land and Zora Link to swim, each with its own storyline. Once they’d settled on masks, Aonuma says, everything fell into place, partly because they didn’t have time for it not to.

Aonuma says one more thing that I think explains the whole game. After Ocarina, there was a sense of unfulfilment among the staff; many of them wanted to redo parts of it or try things they hadn’t had the chance to. Iwata sums it up with a cooking image: Ocarina’s team had made far more good dishes than they had room for on the table. Aonuma makes it clear that if they’d assembled a completely new team, they could never have made Majora’s Mask in a year. It worked because the people who’d just finished Ocarina still had ideas left over, and still knew exactly how that game was built.

Aonuma also admits he felt pushed along by something strange at the time. He’d been trying to work out a story event for the Deku, and one night he dreamed he was being chased by one and woke up screaming. The next day at work, Takumi Kawagoe, who was in charge of the game’s cutscenes, showed him a Deku scene he’d just finished, and it was exactly like the dream. Aonuma asked him how he knew what he’d dreamed. Iwata jokes that Aonuma may have been possessed, and Aonuma doesn’t entirely disagree. It’s a funny story, but it also says something about the state of the team: Majora’s Mask feels like a game made under pressure by people who couldn’t switch off, and by Aonuma’s own account, that’s what it was.

So three things made Majora’s Mask possible in 2000. First, the assets: Ocarina’s models, its engine, and its time system already existed. Second, the team: the people who knew Ocarina inside out were still there. Third, the leftovers: unused ideas and unfinished business that needed a home. Take away any one of those, and Majora’s Mask doesn’t happen. Master Quest, the project Aonuma was meant to make, was eventually released years later on a GameCube bonus disc, and it returned in Ocarina of Time 3D, where Aonuma included an adjusted version to make the remake more formidable. Fifteen years after Majora’s Mask, the assets, the team, and the leftovers came back together.

FROM HOSPITALITY TO A CHALLENGE

Before we get to the 3DS remake, there’s a part of the Iwata Asks interview that I think is more important for 2026 than anything else in it. When Nintendo announced Majora’s Mask 3D in November 2014, the reaction was much stronger than the company expected. Iwata asks Aonuma why, and he says Majora’s Mask is a game that challenges players.

He contrasts it with Ocarina of Time. When the team remade Ocarina for the 3DS, they talked about how much hospitality they felt replaying the original; it welcomes you in, teaches you how everything works and makes sure you never feel lost. Majora’s Mask does the opposite. Aonuma describes it as being stopped at the door and told to go home if you don’t have what it takes. There’s no hand-holding, no gentle explanation of the three-day cycle, and little telling you where to go next.

Majora’s Mask was made for people who had already played Ocarina of Time. The team assumed you’d finished the first game, so they didn’t think you needed step-by-step instructions. In other words, Majora’s Mask wasn’t designed as a standalone game; it was the second half of Ocarina of Time.

That had a cost. One Nintendo staff member in the interview, Tomomi Sano, joined the 3DS project late in development, and she’d played the original as a fan when it came out. She never finished it. She couldn’t always tell why she’d failed, and that made it hard to keep going. According to Aonuma, that’s exactly why Miyamoto wanted the 3DS remake: he felt many people had given up on the Nintendo 64 version partway through. He never saw everything the team put into it.

Iwata’s response to Sano is key because it frames this as a rule for every Nintendo game. When something doesn’t work out, a player should be able to accept that it was their own fault, and the original Majora’s Mask didn’t always pass that test. When Sano played the 3DS version, she failed in the same places she’d failed on the Nintendo 64. The difference was that this time she understood why, so she could accept it and keep going.

Aonuma also mentions a practical reason the 3DS suited the game. If you got stuck somewhere, you could close the lid, put the system to sleep, and come back later, which is useful in a game where one wrong turn can cost you a whole three-day cycle. Switch 2 offers the same thing, and a game built around losing progress sells more easily on a console you can put down and pick up in seconds.

All of this is relevant in 2026. On November 5th, many people will play Ocarina of Time for the first time. Many of them came to Zelda through Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and have never touched the Nintendo 64 era. By the end of this year, Nintendo will have created a whole new generation of Ocarina of Time players, and every one of them will be the audience Majora’s Mask was designed for: people who’ve just finished Ocarina and want the second half. A Majora’s Mask remake wouldn’t need to find an audience, because the Ocarina remake is building one.

THE LID AONUMA DIDN’T WANT TO OPEN

Ocarina of Time 3D was released in June 2011. GREZZO, a fairly small Tokyo studio, co-developed it with Nintendo, and critics praised it. Development on Majora’s Mask 3D started almost immediately afterwards, and once again, it started with Miyamoto. Aonuma says Miyamoto once told him they should release Majora’s Mask on the 3DS.

And Aonuma didn’t want to. This is my favourite part of the whole interview. He explains that he could do so much on the original because he was much younger, and he didn’t want to open that lid again because he knew he’d break out in a cold sweat the moment he did. He wanted to treat Majora’s Mask as something that had happened and leave it there. Miyamoto’s answer was a firm no. He told Aonuma to play the whole game again, look at every part of it, and ask whether it still works for players today.

So Aonuma replayed it, and he kept finding things that made him say, essentially, “what in the world?” He describes how Zelda design normally works: you get a hunch something’s around the corner, and that hunch is enough to push you forward. In the original Majora’s Mask, you’d follow that hunch and find nothing there. Some things had no hints at all, and no one had ever found any. So he wrote a list. The team called it the “what in the world” list, and by the time it reached GREZZO, it had grown into a stack of paper, with Aonuma’s apologies written at the top of every page. He’d write things like: sorry, I know I’m the one who made it this way, but at the time, I think there was something wrong with me.

Aonuma then says the whole approach to Majora’s Mask 3D was only possible because GREZZO had already remade Ocarina of Time 3D. They understood the game, so he knew that once they’d played Majora’s Mask, they’d understand it too. GREZZO presented its first ideas to Miyamoto at the end of 2011, about six months after Ocarina 3D was released. And Aonuma adds something lovely: that GREZZO had re-lived what his own team went through fifteen years earlier. They’d travelled from Ocarina of Time to Majora’s Mask.

Aonuma told the team that every boss fight was strange, because players couldn’t see the bosses’ weak points and ended up winning by attacking at random. So GREZZO rebuilt every boss battle, keeping the models almost the same but changing their movements and strategies so players had a moment of realisation. Yamamura, the liaison between Nintendo and GREZZO, says it took about as much work as building the stages from scratch.

The Bombers, the gang of kids in Clock Town, got the same treatment. In the original, they tell you they’re gathering information about the town, but they don’t give you anything useful; Aonuma admits players probably wondered what they were for. On 3DS, they give you hints, and the Bombers’ Notebook got a proper overhaul, including alerts for when events are about to happen, so you’re less likely to miss something that only occurs at one time on one day. Even the minigames were tuned. In one of Nintendo’s promotional videos, Aonuma got a perfect score on the Clock Town archery game in three attempts using the 3DS’s gyro aiming, something he says he never managed on the Nintendo 64.

The biggest change came late in development. Partway through, Nintendo invited the GREZZO team to Kyoto for a meeting, and when they arrived, they were shown the New Nintendo 3DS, which hadn’t been announced yet. Aonuma immediately asked for the new C stick to control the camera; he’d introduced a free camera in The Wind Waker and knew how much better a Zelda game felt with one. Because the hardware was still secret, GREZZO could only tell a handful of programmers. Majora’s Mask uses more camera setups than Ocarina: climbing ladders, flying as Deku Link, Goron Link standing at a different height than normal Link, and, once the camera is free, players can see things they were never meant to see. On the Nintendo 64, you knew the moon was getting closer, but you couldn’t really look at it. On the New 3DS, you could turn the camera and gaze up at it whenever you wanted, and Aonuma says that clearly showed Majora’s Mask had been reborn.

Aonuma says he repeatedly told the staff never to make the game easier. The pressure of running out of time over three days defines Majora’s Mask, and Sano points out that if you finish the game without the moon falling at least once, it won’t leave much of an impression. Yamamura says the easy fix would have been to put the answers right in front of players, and that they agreed that should never happen, so the remake kept the challenge and removed the unfairness.

That line wasn’t always easy to hold. Aonuma says GREZZO’s team was so motivated that he had to turn down a few ideas for going too far, even as they found improvements his own team had never noticed. And not every change landed with every fan. Some players preferred parts of the original to the 3DS versions, and you’ll still see people hoping that any future remake lets you choose between the two.

It also took a long time. Majora’s Mask 3D was released on February 13th, 2015, alongside the New Nintendo 3DS XL, more than three and a half years after Ocarina 3D. Iwata jokes that while making a new Zelda in one year is rare, he’s never heard of a remake taking three times as long as the original. Aonuma was also making A Link Between Worlds at the same time, and he admits they were partly waiting for the New 3DS hardware.

ZELDA REMAKES COME IN PAIRS

Ocarina and Majora on the 3DS aren’t a one-off. Look at how Nintendo has handled Zelda remakes over the last fifteen years: they keep arriving in pairs, with the second game built on the work done on the first.

On the Wii U, Nintendo released The Wind Waker HD in 2013, and a few years later came Twilight Princess HD in 2016, developed by Tantalus: two GameCube-era Zeldas, both brought to the same console in HD. On the 3DS, it was Ocarina of Time 3D in 2011 and Majora’s Mask 3D in 2015, made by the same studio with the same producer, and the second only possible because of the first.

The most interesting pair is the most recent one. In 2019, GREZZO remade Link’s Awakening for Switch, with that toy-like, diorama look. Five years later, GREZZO made The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, a brand-new top-down Zelda in the same style. In Nintendo’s own developer interview for Echoes of Wisdom, Aonuma says the Link’s Awakening remake became the team’s new approach to top-down Zelda graphics and gameplay feel on Switch. That isn’t a remake followed by a remake, but it’s the same principle: Nintendo rebuilds one Zelda, and the rebuilt tools, the trained team and the new ideas go straight into the next one.

There are exceptions. Skyward Sword HD was released in 2021 with no partner. But line these up, and a few things stand out. The second game always comes from the same pipeline as the first, and it never comes quickly. Majora’s Mask 3D took about three and a half years after Ocarina 3D, Twilight Princess HD arrived roughly two and a half years after The Wind Waker HD, and Echoes of Wisdom took five years after Link’s Awakening. And on the 3DS at least, the second game took bigger risks: GREZZO rebuilt every boss fight in Majora’s Mask 3D after learning the hard lessons on Ocarina.

So apply that to Switch 2. Nintendo has rebuilt Ocarina of Time from the ground up. We don’t yet know which team made it; Nintendo hasn’t said, and the rumours point in more than one direction. Whoever it is, they’re about to finish a modern version of Ocarina’s world: its models, animations, and time system. Majora’s Mask has always been built on those things. If history holds, the question isn’t whether that pipeline produces a second game, but what it is, and only one Zelda game came out of Ocarina of Time.

THE REAL REASON

So let’s put it together. The real reason Majora’s Mask is the obvious next remake isn’t the cards in Nintendo Today, the icons on Switch or the soundtrack on Nintendo Music. It’s the same three ingredients that made it in 2000 and remade it in 2015.

The assets come first. Majora’s Mask exists because Ocarina’s models, engine, and time system could be reused, which is how a full Zelda game was made in a single year. A ground-up Switch 2 Ocarina means a modern Hyrule full of characters, enemies and animations that Termina has always borrowed from: the Gorons, the Zoras, the Deku Scrubs and Link himself. A Majora’s Mask built on that work wouldn’t start from scratch, and in business terms, that’s what makes it sensible. A remake that can reuse much of another remake’s work should cost far less than a new game, and it sells to an audience that already exists.

Then there’s the team. Whoever spent the last few years rebuilding Ocarina of Time now understands that game better than anyone. In 2015, Aonuma said Majora’s Mask 3D was only possible because GREZZO remade Ocarina first, and that logic doesn’t depend on the studio. It depends on the fact that the people who rebuilt Ocarina are the people best placed to rebuild Majora. Aonuma is still the series producer, the same person who made the original in a year and wrote the apology list for the remake.

Then there’s the audience. Majora’s Mask was made for people who’d just finished Ocarina of Time, and Nintendo is about to create a whole new generation of them. Many of those players will finish Ocarina of Time wanting to know what happened to Link next, and Majora’s Mask answers that question: it opens with Link riding out of Hyrule a few months later, searching for a friend.

On the 3DS, the pitch for Majora’s Mask came about six months after Ocarina 3D, and the game arrived three and a half years after it. The Link’s Awakening pipeline took five years to produce Echoes of Wisdom. Nintendo is celebrating Zelda’s 40th anniversary through 2027, and the live-action movie arrives next spring, so it’s tempting to read every Majora’s Mask clue as a countdown. I don’t think it is. The pattern says Termina is next; it doesn’t say Termina is soon. If Nintendo repeated the 3DS timing exactly, we’d be looking at something closer to 2030 than 2027. It could be quicker for a few reasons: the 3DS remake was slowed by Aonuma working on A Link Between Worlds at the same time and by waiting for the New 3DS. But anyone expecting a Majora’s Mask announcement the week after Ocarina launches is likely to be disappointed.

Aonuma told his team never to make the game easier, Sano said you should see the moon fall at least once, and Yamamura said the answers should never be placed right in front of the player. The 3DS team fixed the unfairness and kept the challenge, and whatever form a Switch 2 Majora’s Mask takes, that’s the line it has to walk. One more thing is worth considering. The 3DS camera let players gaze up at the moon whenever they wanted, and Aonuma saw that as the clearest sign the game had been reborn. A modern Termina will let you look at that moon in more detail than ever before, and the hard part will be making sure it still feels like it’s looking back.

Aonuma’s last line in the interview is the best argument for all of this. When he finished Majora’s Mask in 2000, he assumed other companies would start making games like it. Fifteen years later, nobody had. Iwata calls it timeless, and Aonuma agrees: he believed a new generation could play it and still find something that spoke to them. GREZZO’s director, Mikiharu Ooiwa, puts it another way. Because you live the same three days again and again, you notice things on your second cycle that you missed on your first, and more again on your third and fourth. That’s why Nintendo keeps coming back to Majora’s Mask. It should be cheaper to make alongside a rebuilt Ocarina; the team is ready, and the audience is building right now, but it’s also the Zelda game its own director believed nobody else had made anything like. Nintendo doesn’t leave that on the shelf forever.

So here’s my question for you. If Majora’s Mask really is next, what’s the one thing from the original that a remake must never change? Let me know in the comments, because I’ll be reading every one.

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