Google Is Quietly Hiding A New Zelda: Ocarina of Time Easter Egg

The official release of the Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is only a couple of days away, but search engine Google has already started the festivities with a clever nod to Nintendo's landmark adventure game.

Google has created a number of video game homages over the years, like an interactive question mark block from Super Mario in 2015 and its shout-out to Wordle in 2022. The tributes can be pretty elaborate as well: there was that time Google allowed users to play Breakout, or the more recent Pokédex mini-game. The latter, which tasks players with searching for and capturing the compendium of 151 monsters from the original Pokémon Red and Blue, is still active to this day.

How to see Google's Zelda: Ocarina of Time Easter egg

All you need to do to trigger the Easter egg is to search for something related to the upcoming Switch 2 game. You can input a wide range of popular terms, like "Zelda," "Ocarina of Time," and "tloz." Once you do, a hovering graphic of the iconic Master Sword should appear in the bottom-right corner. Click it, and you should hear Link scream "Hya!"

The Triforce will then take over most of the screen and transform the page itself. Google's search results will appear as they did in 1998 — the year that Ocarina of Time was originally released on the Nintendo 64. You can click the sword again to go back to modern Google.

The Zelda Easter egg is a nice touch, but it's also a depressing reminder of just how much the search engine itself has changed over the years. Remember when Google made it easier to find pages published before 2022? You know, the time before your search results were overtaken by an AI chatbot that doesn't link to its sources half of the time? Those were the days!