Tears of the Kingdom could become “the best-selling video game in history” and gross up to $1 billion, according to analyst estimates.
After six years of waiting , Zelda fans flocked to stores around the world this Friday to get hold of the latest installment of the Nintendo video game , one of the most successful sagas in history.
Fans queued for hours before stores opened in cities like Paris, New York and Tokyo, to be the first with a copy of Tears of the Kingdom .
“I bought the collector’s edition, it’s been incredible,” said a smiling Daniel Olivo, a Mexican tourist who took advantage of a break during his visits to Tokyo to pick up the game, which he says he’s known “since I was five years old. “
“I want to rediscover the same open spaces and adventures of previous editions,” added Yutaka Hirai, a 30-year-old fan who says he spent “more than a hundred hours” playing the previous installment in the Japanese capital.
“I’m freaking out because it’s been six years of waiting for this game,” Taylor Meguira, 19, told AFP in Paris as she waited in line.
When Breath of the Wild came out it was a real revolution,” he added about the previous installment of the saga, from 2017. “Knowing that there is a sequel that will be out in an hour or less is incredible, it makes me very happy,” he added while waiting the opening of the store.
The first opinions about this new installment of Zelda give it a score of 97 out of 100 on Metacritic, a website specialized in collecting reviews.
The game, based on the exploits of Princess Zelda and the warrior Link, has sold 125 million copies worldwide since its first edition in 1986.
“A Pioneer”
The game cemented the concept of “open world”, in which the user has the freedom to move around a virtual landscape. An idea later taken up by very popular games like Grand Theft Auto and Skyrim .
His main challenge this year will be to increase the revenue of the Japanese video game giant and extend the life of its Switch console, which experts say is in its last days after seven years on the market.
The first episode of the saga, The Legend of Zelda , took players into a universe unknown and largely without instructions.
Its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto , drew inspiration from his childhood travels through the Japanese countryside to create landscapes of forests, lakes, caverns, and mountains.
It was a success from the beginning and marked generations of video game fans.
And yet, its launch in the 80s was a bet by a company until then known for games of a very different format, such as Donkey Kong or Super Mario Bros.
“The potential of the game was enormous, at a time when most were finished in an hour or two,” recalls Kiyoshi Tane, who specializes in the history of video games.
“It was kind of a pioneer of what open-world games were going to turn out to be,” he adds.
Some time later, around 2010, Nintendo, however, found that its new editions did not cause the same furor. The designers rethought the game and released Breath of the Wild , which has been the best-selling edition of Zelda ever since .
Nintendo’s earnings projections for this year aren’t very rosy, but Charles Louis Planade, an analyst at Midcap Partners, believes that Tears of the Kingdom could become “the best-selling video game ever” and gross as much as $1 billion. of dollars.
The new installment could be “by far the biggest contributor to Nintendo’s sales this year,” said Serkan Toto, an analyst at Kantan Games. (With information from AFP)