The Legend of Zelda timeline, explained

polygon.com:

Placing the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on a timeline is pretty simple: It’s set shortly after the events of Breath of the Wild. But the chronological sequence for the Legend of Zelda series as a whole is… complicated. To say the least.

There’s nearly 40 years of Zelda history establishing that it’s not safe to assume anything about any given game’s timing — or the flow of time in general. Ignoring some spinoffs, there are officially 19 ​​— soon to be 20 — games across 37 years that make up the Zelda series, from 1986’s The Legend of Zelda to 2023’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. A handful of them fit neatly together — there are a few direct prequels and sequels — but any chronology across the whole series quickly gets muddied by time travel, multiple timelines, and a 10,000-year time skip.

Thankfully, in 2011, we got the first officially published timeline in The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia. (The creative team behind the Zelda series had an eyes-only, confidential version of the timeline sometime before 2003.) That official version rearranges the games into a cohesive-ish timeline that branches into three possible outcomes.

But things get complicated when we get to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. This is made explicit in the book The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Creating a Champion: “Hyrule’s recurring periods of prosperity and decline have made it impossible to tell which legends are historical fact and which are mere fairy tale.” That doesn’t negate the previous timeline as established in Hyrule Historia, but it gives room to explain any inconsistencies with the wave of a hand. Myths and fairy tales don’t have to be perfectly consistent, after all. They’re