1998 Nintendo Fantasy Masterpiece, With an Unbeaten 99 Metacritic Score, Ranked Among Best Games of All Time

There's a reason people still argue about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Reddit threads and gaming YouTube almost 30 years later. It's not nostalgia goggles talking.

Back in 1998, critics were losing their minds over it. Famitsu, the Japanese gaming magazine known for being brutally stingy with high scores, gave it a perfect 40 out of 40. That had literally never happened before in the outlet's history. Meanwhile, IGN's staff reportedly locked themselves in a room with a big-screen TV the second the final build showed up and didn't stop playing for 17 hours straight. That's the kind of reaction this game got before "viral" was even a concept.

All these years later, Ocarina of Time still sits at a 99 on Metacritic, the highest score any video game has ever received. Not the highest for its era, the highest ever, full stop, ahead of everything that's come out since.

What's wild is how much of the game people are still discovering. There's an entire speedrunning community that treats Ocarina of Time like a sacred text, finding new glitches and shortcuts in a 26-year-old game like it's brand new. Modders keep building romhacks and randomizers to squeeze fresh playthroughs out of it. And Koji Kondo's soundtrack, especially Zelda's Lullaby and the Song of Storms, still shows up in orchestral game concerts today, decades after it first played through a tinny N64 speaker.

Part of what keeps it alive is that so much of what felt experimental in 1998 just became the standard afterward. Lock-on combat, expansive 3D worlds, using music as an actual gameplay mechanic instead of background noise, all of that traces back to this game. Newer titles keep trying to top it, and plenty come close, but nothing has managed to actually knock it off its perch.

This story was originally published by Parade on Sep 4, 2026, where it first appeared in the Entertainment section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.