Ocarina of Time Beats Call of Duty in a Chart Owned by Switch 2
A 1998 N64 game just took the UK number one away from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. Not a full remake with new tech, not a discounted bundle — Ocarina of Time, arriving on Switch 2, went straight to the top of the chart in its debut week and pushed Activision’s shooter to #2. On a platform that launched with Mario Kart World, the fastest-selling game of the week is a cartridge-era Zelda running in a form factor you can hold in two hands.
The head-to-head is the headline, but the shape of the rest of the top 40 is the story. Seventeen of the 40 entries carry Nintendo as publisher, and the biggest movers are back-catalogue titles people are buying again rather than anything built for the new hardware. For handheld players, that’s not a warning sign — it’s an accurate picture of how the first year of a Nintendo portable platform actually looks, and it tells you exactly what you’ll be playing on the commute for the next twelve months.
A 1998 N64 Game Just Outsold Call of Duty
Strip out the platform war framing and Ocarina’s win is a statement about Switch 2’s software slate. The console’s biggest seller this week is a game designed for three-pronged controllers and a 4:3 CRT, reworked for a 2026 handheld hybrid. Nintendo hasn’t detailed the port’s technical specification, but it doesn’t need to — the chart is doing the arguing. Switch 2 owners are paying new-release money for library depth, and they’re doing it in the first year, before the release calendar fills out.
That matters more for portable play than it does for the console war. Ocarina of Time happens to be one of the most handheld-compatible games Nintendo ever shipped by accident: discrete dungeon chunks, Hyrule Field stretches that read as survey the area rather than run the marathon, and a save system that pairs well with suspend-resume. The version of this game that makes the most sense in 2026 is the one on a screen you can fold shut mid-temple. Nintendo has essentially sold its own back catalogue back to itself, and the format does the work.
Seventeen Nintendo Slots in the Top 40
Count the publisher column and the UK chart stops looking like a multi-platform list. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe — a 2014 Wii U game — sits at #16, up two places. Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2 leapt from #40 to #28. Breath of the Wild is back at #31, Tears of the Kingdom re-enters at #34 in the same week a new Zelda SKU launches, and Donkey Kong Bananza climbs to #17. Some of that is launch-week bounce, but bounce only happens on a platform people are actively carrying.
The number worth tracking isn’t Ocarina at #1. It’s that Mario Kart World at #4 is still the clearest Switch 2-native title in the top five, with Nintendo Switch Sports Resort at #5 and a wall of ports and remasters behind it. Legacy software is holding the chart together while the native slate fills in. That’s a good problem for a buyer — there’s a decade of portable-optimal software to catch up on — and a real one for anyone hoping the second half of the year brings a wave of games built for the hardware rather than upscaled onto it.
Godzilla at #9, Stellar Blade at #12: Mid-Chart Is Where Portables Live
Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered lands at #9 for Atari, beating Resident Evil Requiem at #10 and Stellar Blade Complete Edition at #12, the same pairing that led the release week. Those are the debuts that actually matter to a handheld library — licensed remasters and Complete Editions are cheap to run, quick to pick up, and they slot into fifteen-minute sessions in a way a hundred-hour open world never will. A GameCube-era kaiju brawler outselling a flagship survival horror entry in its first week is a genuine signal about what this audience wants on the go.
The caveat worth stating plainly: the chart data doesn’t specify which formats the Stellar Blade Complete Edition shipped on, so treat its #12 as a sales fact and not as proof of a new platform. What is clear is the ceiling. New third-party releases are landing in the bottom half of a chart whose top ten is seven parts Nintendo, and the pattern repeats every week a first-party port ships. If you’re deciding what to install before a flight, the chart is telling you the answer is the twenty-hour remaster, not the sixty-hour blockbuster.