The Great Flood maybe..

It's obvious that Nintendo never had a timeline planned when they made these games, it's just fabricated afterwards. Why do you guys lose so much sleep over this timeline when essentially none of the games have ANYTHING to do with one another?

The only problem I have with this 3 way split is that if you have one game where Link can fail to beat Ganon then he has a chance to fail in every game. Why does it only split at OoT when it should theoretically be able to split at every game?

Time travel. Link's failure prevents the timeline split, in essence creating a third timeline. Really the failure timeline is the "main" line, where history effectively ran its course as it should have, without link being removed from the line (as in the Adult line) or without preventing Ganondorf's rise (as in the child line). Here we see Ganondorf conquer, but the hero's legacy endure (despite the hero dying, but this is a reincarnation thing)

I never cared about this but now I think is pretty cool, very interesting and just makes me want to play them again lol

A lot is said about a new timeline being created when Link got the Master Sword in OoT, but is actually the same timeline. I found this comment in NintendoLife and makes sense to me:


"I also want to add. The Master Sword didn't cause the split. The Gate of Time and Master Sword were both designed so you could time travel freely back and forth. Things you do in the past changed the present.

It was when Zelda sent Link back with the Ocarina that caused the split. So Link dying is an alternate outcome not really a split but comes from the Adult ending."

I understood it as when Link got the song of storms and went back to the past to dry up the well with it he caused a split in the timeline because him drying up the well was something that didn't happen in the "original timeline".

What bugs me about that is you get the song of storms from the windmill guy talks about a kid using it and the well is dried up. So Link didn't make any changes but just doing things he was destined to do.

Did that make sense?

This... I like this. I hope this is the explanation nintendo gives in their timeline

Now I know why they didn't want to show it lol.

That was awesome. I was laughing my head off during the bit Doc explained the timeline.