Saturday Night Live may have seemingly tried (and failed) to poke fun at The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake in a recent sketch pitting it against GTA 6, but former Nintendo marketing leads Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang reckon that the house of Mario would actually have had a “pretty positive reaction” to it internally.
The SNL sketch from earlier in the month saw two people dressed as Link and GTA 6’s Jason, respectively, each trying to one-up the other by bragging about what their games have to offer as they fight for dominance in November in their own sort of Barbenheimer moment. The tone of the sketch makes it quite clear that Zelda is supposed to be the less exciting option here – comparing GTA 6’s action, sex appeal, and fast cars to Zelda’s puzzles and Link’s “little green dress” – but ironically, the crowd’s reaction to the Nintendo game is so loud that the entire joke kind of falls on its face, instead proving Ocarina of Time’s immense popularity.
Ellis and Yang, respectively the former director of social media marketing and original content, and senior manager of creator relations and original content at Nintendo of America, discuss the sketch in a new video on their YouTube channel (below), opening with the fact that Nintendo “did not like the Elon Musk” Wario SNL sketch from 2021. That one aired when they were still working at the company, with Yang saying it “was not received well” internally.
And, well, it’s little wonder. The sketch sees Wario – played by Tesla and SpaceX boss Musk – defending himself in a court case over the murder of Mario in a Mario Kart-esque road accident. During the sketch, there are also references to Mario doing drugs and Luigi sexting Princess Peach. Not exactly brand-friendly stuff.
How about the Ocarina of Time one, though? Yang suggests that Nintendo “didn’t hate this,” partly because it “positions the game as a huge deal” and, to some extent, accurately markets it through its mentions of the game’s puzzles. And, as Ellis adds, it portrays it as “equal to GTA 6,” which is obviously a good thing by anyone’s metrics.
That’s not to say that Nintendo would have loved everything about the sketch, though. Ellis suggests that the company wouldn’t have liked the portrayal of Link as being a character “for nerds, for losers,” and leaning into those “old rooted perceptions of video games in general where it’s like, ‘Oh, GTA, that’s for the cool kids.'”
Yang adds that the company also likely didn’t enjoy the sketch making fun of Zelda’s art style, and “probably didn’t love that when he pulled out the little bottle with a fairy in it that the fairy completely fell apart and died.” Oops. Overall though, she argues, “I think Nintendo would have a pretty positive reaction to this, because yeah, generally it’s positioning Ocarina of Time out to be a a very big deal, a worthy side by side to potentially what is the biggest game of the year, GTA 6.”
All in all, then, it could have been a lot worse for Nintendo, and the crowd’s extremely positive reaction to Zelda in the sketch is the cherry on top, perhaps unintentionally showing what a real GTA 6 rival the company has on its hands.