Could a Legend of Zelda movie happen?

Reminder that today only (12/5/23), to celebrate the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, we are giving away a free Zelda Scotland map poster to anyone that spends £5 or more in R-CADE Glasgow from 12-7pm.

“Maybe the voice of the fans is what’s important here.” - Hidemaro Fujibayashi, director of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on if a Legend of Zelda movie could happen.

Traditionally, it's expected that films based on video games will be panned by critics and do poorly in the box office. Assassin's Creed (2016), Prince of Persia, Warcraft and Lara Croft Tomb Raider have all struggled on the Rotten Tomato's scale (even if some of them have a dear place in our hearts.) But in the last couple of years the tides of turned and video game centric films seem to be beloved by fans and critics alike.

Whether totally animated (the recent Mario Bros movie has nearly made $1billion worldwide) or a live action/animation mix like Detective Pikachu and two successful Sonic films - gaming movies have rounded the corner.

But could The Legend of Zelda join the party?

“I have to say, I am interested. For sure. But it’s not just me being interested in something that makes things happen, unfortunately.” said Eiji Aonuma, The Legend of Zelda series producer, in that same interview with Polygon. The quirk with producing a Legend of Zelda movie is that one came out in 2009.

"Nintendo is like a talent agency. We have many other entertainers on our roster," said Shigeru Miyamoto in an interview with Nikkei (available in English at Video Games Chronicle).

"There are various ways to develop characters (for the screen), including characters that are suitable for film and characters that are well known.

For Nintendo fans, that might be a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand it means the company is more open to putting their properties into different mediums, which means fans are able to explore their favourite worlds from a different angle.

But for some fans this would be a negative - overexposing their favourite characters and ruining their personal perception of the characters.

The question of being well known for The Legend of Zelda franchise becomes less and less difficult with each successful Switch game, and so the likelihood of a market that's prepared for a movie starring Link grows stronger and stronger.

And with queues at Game on Argyle street today to buy the game on day one - it looks like Tears of the Kingdom will be another home run.

The question will be if the movie's animated or live action. Luckily there's an example of both.

Miyamoto ominously added this to his Nikkei interview: "Please keep an eye on our next production.” "We’re working together into the future with me in that capacity. But it’s hard for us to talk about anything else at this time.” said Illumination CEO Chris Meladandri to ScreenRant. It seems as though another Illumination and Nintendo collaborative product is on the cards - but will it be 2 Mario 2 Luigi or the big screen launch of The Legend of Zelda? We wait with baited breath (of the wild).

Star Wars Day At R-CADE

It's almost that time of the year when we can fully embrace our appreciation for the best space western franchise ever created! Star Wars day lands on a Thursday this year, and we know not everyone can join in the fun on a weekday, so we have dedicated an entire weekend jam packed with events and promos for you all. Here's what's happening:

We kick off the weekend with the official Star Wars day itself. from 12-7pm we will be celebrating with lots of Star Wars themed video games and board games. Everyone who visits R-CADE in cosplay on the 4th will get a free arcade pass too! (Arcade pass can either be redeemed on the day or for a future session). We will be serving Blue Bantha milk and... ahem... EMPIRE biscuits in our cafe (see what we did there!) From 7-10pm we will continue the party for our over 18's Lates sessions with a few rounds of Star Wars Battlefront too.

Friday is REVENGE OF THE FIFTH! From 7pm join us for our monthly quiz night, this month is of course all about the War of Stars! 6 rounds of Star Wars trivia and an ungodly amount of prizes to give away! This event is part of our R-CADE Lates over 18's event, BYOB and prizes for all teams too!

Saturday will be epic movie marathon day! From 12pm we will celebrate as many Star Wars movies as we can possibly squeeze in throughout the day. No we're not telling you which trilogy we are choosing, you will just have to visit and find out!

Sunday the 7th we will complete our Star Wars weekend with a few evening sessions dedicated to our favourite retro video games based in outer space. From Asteroids, Defender and Laser Blast on the Atari, to Starfox on the SNES, Super Space Invaders on The Sega Master System to Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, and of course we will be playing a selection of Classic Star Wars games on a number of platforms too. You can book tickets for our quiz, Star Wars day and 'Games From Outer Space' sessions via our special events page on our website HERE .

March Madness: Video Game Edition

In American college basketball, it doesn’t get any bigger than March Madness. 64 of the best teams in the country, sorted into four conferences based on how well they’ve done all year, to compete in a single elimination tournament to crown the national champion.

This final tournament setting is the purest distillation of sports, where small David’s can overcome massive Goliaths on the strength of a single shot. It creates some of the best stories of the athletic calendar and always evokes the desire to see the same tournament recreated in other formats. To go along with tradition, we’ve compiled a tournament bracket of the 32 most popular video game franchises of all time (according to Wikipedia) and paired them off to uncover the true best video game franchise of all time! The franchises were snake drafted into seed one through eight, and split into four different regions to eventually come to a final four, and then champion overall. Seeding was decided based on their total number of sales. Those seeds then faced off, 1st vs 8th, 2nd vs 7th, 3rd vs 6th and 4th vs 5th, with winners decided through Twitter polls.

In the end, we will be left with the consensus BEST FRANCHISE EVER!

1st Round

The biggest storylines that go throughout a March Madness bracket is the potential for upsets, and for a lower seed to go on a Cinderella run.

From our opening round, the biggest upset by far was by 8th seeded Super Smash Brothers (SSB), overtaking number one seed Call of Duty (CoD). While in some ways this is not a surprising turn of events, I’d personally assume that while the Smash Brothers fanbase is more rabid, there’s a reason that Call of Duty is a first seed - it’s got a much wider spread. As with most upsets, it was a relatively close call for the victors, SSB winning with 63% of the vote.

The tightest margin of victory for the opening round was down to Halo’s upset of the Lego franchise. 52% of the vote for the space shooter overtook possibly the most diverse back catalogue of any competitor in this series.

Unsurprisingly, many of the other matchups were blowout victories: fifth seed Tomb Raider beat fourth seed Need for Speed 77% to 23%; Sonic (third) crushed Gran Turismo (6th), 77/23; to my personal surprise, Tetris demolished Animal Crossing in a 1/8 matchup, taking it 85/15 - but the biggest win of the first round is Zelda (4th) over Pro Evolution Soccer (5th), 87/13.

2nd Round

Our second round opens with by far the biggest sweep of the series. Overall first seeded Mario obliterated NBA 2k, with 92.9% of the Twitter vote.

Equally surprising, we had our first exact tie, between two of the powerhouses for this competition, and Mario’s biggest threats. Pokémon (first seed) and The Legend of Zelda (fourth seed) couldn’t be separated. We had to decide in the fairest way possible who would go through. So Andy picked his favourite. Pokémon going through.

The Cinderella story for Super Smash Brothers continued, overcoming tight competition from fifth seeded Tomb Raider, winning by 57%.

Elite Eight

Our Elite Eight, the quarter finals, the eight best franchises in this competition, was as expected a tough vote.

None of the four matchups went past a 64/36 split, which went to Pokémon in a victory over Final Fantasy (third seed), continuing the mini monsters run as the second favourite.

Mario beat Halo by the same margin that Grand Theft Auto overcame Super Smash Brothers, with 57% of the vote over 43%. This finished off our remaining low seed franchises. Seventh seed Halo had made it through Lego and The Sims in close back-to-back contests. Each franchise brought something unique to the table that the others couldn’t match up to - but in the end first persons shooters make it over.

Grand Theft Auto pulled it out over the plucky underdog that was Super Smash Brothers, our longest competing eighth seed.

Tetris beat Assassin’s Creed in a surprisingly easy 60/40 split for the one seed. This rounded out our Final Four, with all one and two seeds.

Final Four

The Final Four franchises had some similarities and differences between them. Mario and Pokémon as one seeds representing Nintendo and 90s nostalgia, taking on a modern classic in Grand Theft Auto and one of the OGs of the gaming space in Tetris. Nintendo dominates the landscape as is to be expected - and in some ways it wasn’t even close.

Mario, the clear favourite, had the win of a championship contender over Grand Theft Auto, taking 73% of the vote. The plucky New York plumber outlasted the violence of Grand Theft Auto, in a match-up that reminds me of that Robot Chicken bit that drove the internet wild 15 years ago.

Tetris fell to the best collectable of all time, proving once and for all colourful moving shapes do best when they’re fighting rather than falling. The Pocket Monsters moved on to the final vote, against their biggest in company rival.

The Finals

Really, there was no point in doing this experiment, as the highest selling franchise of all time, the defender of the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario Mario wins out over Pokémon 69% to 31%.

I don’t think Mario could have faced a better challenger than he did in the final. While both franchises have core elements surrounded by spin-off series that vary the catalogue on offer, Mario’s selection has been more successful.

Not only successful for the central character, but spawning opportunities for his brother, evil twin and best friend. When I compiled the initial list, and sorted seeds based on highest number of sales, the Super Mario games would have been the sixth seed overall on their own, while Mario Kart is a top 15 franchise in its own right.

Mario Mario and friends is stacked beyond belief, and while Professor Oak tries his best with mainline titles, Mystery Dungeon storylines, fighting games and photography outings, the success pales in comparison to the eventual winner.

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Do you think Mario deserves the title of Greatest Franchise of all time? What’s your personal pick? Should we do more Twitter tournaments? Will Elon let us?

Until next time!