The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has worn the Metacritic crown for decades, sitting comfortably at a near-perfect 99 since the aggregation site began retroactively compiling scores for the 1998 Nintendo classic. That consensus has gone largely unchallenged — until now. Did You Know Gaming, the YouTube channel known for deep-dive trivia and historical excavation, has released a video arguing that the math behind that 99 simply does not hold up under scrutiny. Their recalculation drops the score to 98, a single point that carries outsized symbolic weight: it would knock Ocarina off its solo perch and into a four-way tie for the highest-rated game ever recorded on the platform.
Quick Facts — The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
| Publisher | Nintendo |
|---|---|
| Release Date | 1998 |
| Score | 99 |
For players who grew up with the Nintendo 64 masterpiece, the number feels academic — Ocarina of Time's legacy is etched in design history, not a metadata aggregate. But Metacritic's influence extends far beyond bragging rights. Publishers have historically tied developer bonuses to specific score thresholds, and Guinness World Records has cited the 99 as the basis for some of its "highest-rated video game" records. If the methodology is flawed, the record books are too. Did You Know Gaming's investigation does not argue that Ocarina is overrated; it argues that the specific number attached to it on the industry's most cited scoreboard is the product of inconsistent data handling.
How Metacritic Built the 99
Metacritic launched in 2001, three years after Ocarina of Time arrived on Nintendo 64. To populate its database for pre-existing titles, the site compiled 22 contemporary reviews from publications that existed in 1998 — among them the nascent IGN, the Canadian TV show Electric Playground, and Famitsu magazine, which awarded the game its first-ever perfect score. Those 22 scores, averaged and rounded into a score out of 100, produced the 99 that has stood unchallenged for over two decades. The problem, according to Did You Know Gaming, is not the reviews themselves but which ones made the cut and which ones did not.
The channel's researchers found that Metacritic included perfect scores from Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro but excluded reviews from other approved publications that were factored into scores for later Zelda titles. Notably absent: Game Informer and Nintendo Power, the latter being Nintendo's own in-house publication, which gave Ocarina a 95. Early blog reviews showed similar discrepancies. Whether this was deliberate cherry-picking or simply a failure to track down quarter-century-old back issues, the result is a dataset that does not match Metacritic's own stated inclusion standards for other games in the same franchise.
Ocarina's Fake 99
The second pillar of Did You Know Gaming's critique concerns what made it into the average. The aggregation includes write-ups that merely describe the game as "perfect" without assigning a numerical score, as well as retrospective articles published well after the game's 1998 launch. Metacritic's methodology is supposed to rely on contemporary, scored reviews from approved outlets. Counting flowery retrospectives and non-numerical praise as perfect scores skews the average upward and violates the site's own protocols. When DYKG stripped out those questionable entries and added the missing approved publications back in, their recalculation yielded a raw score of 97.6 — which, per the site's rounding protocol, becomes 98.
"The calculation for Ocarina's meta-score is deeply flawed. We're not attributing any of this to malice. We get that hunting down every back issue of every magazine for every game was a tall order back then. Mistakes were made. But hey, we all make mistakes. That said, none of that changes the fact that Ocarina's championship belt simply isn't legitimate. And by extension, some of its Guinness records aren't either."
That 98 would place Ocarina of Time in a tie with Grand Theft Auto IV, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Soulcalibur — all currently sitting at 98. In the interest of fairness, Did You Know Gaming applied the same fact-checking rigor to Soulcalibur, another pre-Metacritic launch title. Despite similar gaps in the historical record, Soulcalibur's score held at 98 after their audit, suggesting the inconsistency is specific to how Ocarina's dataset was assembled rather than a systemic issue across all legacy titles.
Did Zelda's Perfect Score Deserve 95?
Metacritic's influence on the industry is difficult to overstate. For years, publisher contracts included bonus clauses triggered by specific Metascore thresholds; a single point could mean the difference between a studio receiving a payout or not. Guinness World Records has cited the 99 as the basis for recognizing Ocarina of Time as the highest-rated game in history. If the underlying math is unsound, those records rest on a shaky foundation. Did You Know Gaming's argument is not that Ocarina is anything less than a landmark achievement — it is that an aggregate score presented as objective truth should at minimum be mathematically defensible.
The channel closes its video with a broader point: Metacritic serves as a decent starting point for critical consensus, but it pales in comparison to developing your own taste through critics and outlets whose sensibilities align with yours. An aggregate can only fit loosely over truth. For the bean counters and record keepers, the number matters. For everyone else, the game remains what it has always been — a 1998 masterpiece that changed 3D action-adventure design forever, whether the scoreboard reads 99, 98, or something else entirely.
The dispute paints a clear picture of how easily historical records can slip apart when pieced together decades later. Metacritic’s 22‑review count for Ocarina of Time pulls from a mix of old magazines, TV segments, and early web pages that are either gone or no longer the same. Interestingly, the channel uncovered missing scores from big names like *Game Informer
