If i made it in the last 5 months or so sure but i said it before we even got shipment numbers for its first quarter :P

10mil wasnt like an all out there number but zelda never managed to do over 9mil before and TP was a launch release for the crazy "wii" home console. Never thought switch would be this successful

Edit: unless im being "Rol" right now i made this a day before nsw/botw released!

King of Fighters has a big budget movie and it's nowhere known as these games so that's a null and void point, arcades were only big in certain particular countries and were a niche thing in many others for example here in the UK we had arcades but they were frequented by a cult dedicated following. Mortal Kombat was also never revolutionary at any point it just had graphic violence in it.

Sonic only became the face of Sega as the Mega Drive arrived before that it was Alex the Kidd and yes we can do that actually if you hold up a picture of both characters the only difference is that the non gamer may get Sonic's name correct while they'll call Link Zelda. In both popularity and numbers Zelda beats these games out.

Its now looking like the Switch version could do 10m alone, it was at 6.7m at the end of Dec and likely over 7m by the end of the fiscal year.

Likely over 7mil is an understatement! In japan the game i was believed very short supply and is selling very well even now (still 10k+). Japan alone the game sat at 900k ship+digital. Dont be surprised if it does over 200k alone in japan :p

Yeah im just trying to stay a bit conservative since i predicted 7m at the end of Dec and came up a bit short.

7.2m is what ill go with.

It was the most graphic video game ever released at the time, that alone got it widespread media coverage and was the reason we have ratings on videogames to this day. Any parent who raised children in the early 90's will recognize the name MORTAL KOMBAT over Zelda for that reason alone. Like I said before Zelda is HUGE in the gaming world, those outside of it aren't as familiar. Even things like "Finish Him", "Fatality" etc; people are familiar with these terms. The general population won't know what Hyrule Castle, Master Sword, or even the triforce are. 

Yep, that's what I'm thinking as well. It would still make it the best-selling Zelda of all-time! There's always a chance it could JUST make it to 10 million and that would be cool. FFVII did it largely thanks to 4 million being sold in Japan. Zelda, however, barely sells a million there.

Outside the gaming world things become even more lopsided in Zelda's favour I think you're mistaking you knowing about some of these series as their perceived standing most people outside of gaming don't get references like Finish Him and so on if you walked up to anyone who didn't game and mentioned Mortal Kombat they'd be puzzled. People don't need to know about Hyrule or Zelda lore all they need to do is recognise the franchise which many do and far more recognised Zelda than MK.

Ummm what? Do you not know the numbers now or am i missing something?

The point is, terms like "finish him" are a part of pop culture (at least in the states), while there aren't any catch phrases from Zelda the general public necessarily recognize. Then again we're from different parts of the world, so this entire debate is more than likely moot without conducting a poll of people who don't necessarily play video games. Everything else brought up thus far has been purely anecdotal.