Zelda Timeline 2026

Last verified: 2026-11-10

The Wind Waker on the timeline

The Wind Waker is the first game on the adult timeline. Hyrule is already flooded. The child timeline's Twilight Princess is a different history.

At a glance

Original platform
GameCube
First release
2002-12-13
Timeline placement
Adult branch, centuries after Ocarina of Time; the gods flood Hyrule, and Link sails the Great Sea. North American release date differs: Wikipedia game article gives 2003-03-23; Wikipedia media list and Zelda Wiki give 2003-03-24.
Link
Link (Hero of Winds)
Zelda
Tetra / Princess Zelda
Main antagonist
Ganondorf
Original parchment chart of the Downfall, Child, and Adult branches
Official key art for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD

Key art © Nintendo, used with a link to the product page. Chart art on this site is original.

Link is the Hero of Winds from Outset Island. Tetra is the pirate captain who is also this era's Zelda. Ganondorf is the antagonist; the King of Red Lions, Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule, helps Link. Japan released the GameCube game on 13 Dec 2002, North America on 23 Mar 2003 in the individual Wikipedia article or 24 Mar in the media-list record (source disagreement retained), and Europe on 2 May 2003. The Wind Waker HD on Wii U released in Japan on 26 Sep 2013; North America received the digital version on 20 Sep and the physical edition on 4 Oct, also the European launch day. A Nintendo Classics release is noted in our obtain line as 2025 with no day, so the day stays blank.

People ask whether Wind Waker came out before Twilight Princess. Yes. Twilight Princess is late 2006. They also ask whether it came out before Skyward Sword. Yes. Skyward Sword is 2011. Those are release facts. The story order is the opposite of the Skyward Sword comparison: Skyward Sword is the beginning of the legend, and this game is centuries after an adult victory in Ocarina of Time. Shipping order and story order are both on this site, on different pages, so they stop correcting each other.

Phantom Hourglass is the next game, still on the ocean. Spirit Tracks is after that, on a new land. Ocarina of Time is the predecessor in the sense that the adult ending is the past this ocean remembers. There is no chart arrow from Majora's Mask to Outset Island.

The flood is the adult path's answer to a hero who left. It is not the backstory of Twilight Princess, where Ganondorf survived an attempted execution and was banished instead. I keep the ocean pictures on this page and the twilight pictures on that one. A preference for this timeline, which shows up in search logs, is a taste. It is not a vote that deletes the other two columns.

The Zora question belongs to the adult-timeline page: the Rito of this sea are widely read as the Zora's descendants, with two articles from one community wiki and no sentence on Nintendo's chart that states the biology. I point there instead of repeating a claim this box does not need.

Sources