The Zelda Movie Star Reminded Me That Breath of the Wild Is Now an 'Old' Game

Benjamin Evan Ainsworth is the live-action Link in the upcoming Zelda movie. He's probably best known for his role in House of the Dragon, but that's not what caught my attention. What caught my attention was something he said in a recent interview: he couldn't play Breath of the Wild when it launched in 2017 because he was too young.

Let that land for a second.

Breath of the Wild came out on the Switch in March 2017. That's eight and a half years ago as I write this. If you played it at launch as an adult, you are now eight and a half years older. If you played it as a teenager, you probably have a job and rent and a sleep schedule. And if you were a small child in 2017 — like Ainsworth was — you are now old enough to star in a big-budget Hollywood adaptation of the thing you were too young to play.

That's the kind of time-distortion that makes you look at your own shelf of game cases and wonder which ones are actually vintage now. Breath of the Wild is not vintage. It's still current in conversation. But it's also now the Ocarina of Time of its era — a landmark game that younger players will experience as a classic they came to later, not a launch-day miracle.

And here's the unexpected connection I want to draw: this is exactly how I felt about Pokémon Red and Blue when I heard a younger cousin talk about it as "the one before Gold and Silver." To me, Red and Blue were the origin. But to someone born a few years later, they were just the old ones. The same thing happens now with Breath of the Wild. It's the game that reshaped open-world design, that broke the Zelda formula wide open, that made climbing and gliding feel like verbs you'd known your whole life. But to the actor playing Link, it's the one that was already out when he was old enough to hold a controller.

That doesn't diminish the game. It just reframes it. Every generation gets its watershed. For my parents' generation, it was the NES and possibly The Legend of Zelda itself. For mine, it was Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid. For a lot of people a little younger than me, it was Minecraft. For the generation coming up now, Breath of the Wild is the baseline — the game that set the expectation for what an adventure game is.

Ainsworth said, "It might show my age, but I didn't manage to play Breath of the Wild until I was a bit older." He was probably 8 or 9 when it came out. That's not just a cute anecdote. It's a genuine shift in perspective. The movie he's starring in is about the Zelda that he eventually encountered, not the one that defined anyone's childhood. He's coming to it as a fan, but as a fan who knows it as something that existed before he could fully engage with it.

That's a different kind of love. It's not nostalgia. It's discovery. And honestly, that might make for a better performance. Link is often a blank slate — someone who steps into a world already in motion. Ainsworth's relationship with the game mirrors that.

So yes, this news made me feel old. But it also made me grateful. Breath of the Wild is the kind of game that will outlive its launch generation. It's already being handed down. And that's the highest compliment you can pay a piece of interactive art — that it becomes part of the foundation for the next wave of players, and eventually for the people who will bring it to life on screen.

I just hope the movie doesn't make me feel any older.