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Dulfite said:
Jumpin said:

I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it.

Both Switch and NES have sold 62 million units:

Zelda 1 only sold 6.51 million, and Zelda 2 sold 4.38 million; but Breath of the Wild has sold 18.6 million. To me that indicates that Breath of the Wild has reached more people and is therefore more popular.

I do agree with keeping Zelda 2 around in its original form - I tend to like the original adaptations of games myself, but I am also not against having an update of the game.

Even Shakespeare has been revised and adapted.

When doing comparisons it's important to note what the market was like back then compared to now. 

There were 5.015 billion people back then, compared to 7.8 billion now for one thing. That's a 36% increase in people. So let's add that to the 6.51 and 4.38 million sold, meaning Zelda 1 would have sold 8.9 million now and Zelda 2 6 million.

But it's not just population growth. It's how big the gaming market was back then compared to now. NES was 62 mil, as you said, and (let's go conservative), at the low end Switch will sell 100 million. There are proportionally more gamers now days than there were in 1987, how many more it's hard to tell. But if taken into account, then those Zelda 1/2 would be much higher if NES had launched with this size gaming market.

Botw numbers, probably not, but maybe close.

I don't think that is a good analysis. Population doesn't change the fact that 62 million systems have been sold. And size of the market also doesn't change that fact either. But what does matter is we're talking about Zelda when it was a brand new series, that is very different than venerated historied Zelda series we know today. Yes Zelda did become one of the big series because of the NES games, but that is very different than being a highly anticipated game like BotW was that came out at launch and has been the killer app of the system.