Nintendo Celebrates Zelda’s 25th Anniversary in Style!

Last year, Nintendo celebrated Mario’s 25th anniversary with a re-release of Super Mario All-Stars. This year, it’s Zelda’s turn, but Nintendo is taking a bit of a different tack. On the 3DS, Nintendo announced that the classic Game Boy title, Link’s Awakening will be one of the launch titles for the portable’s Virtual Console service. Also announced was an absolutely free to download and play version of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords for DSiWare. This will probably be the first time that particular game has a multiplayer option that is intuirive and doesn’t require insane setups to use, which is nice.

Another great addition to the 25th Anniversary festivities was the announcement of a Orchestrated Music tour feature the music of The Legend of Zelda, similar to Video Games Live. Details regarding this concert series are still forthcoming, but it is very exciting. Also on the music front, Nintendo plans on releasing two music CDs. One, being the CD version of the above concert, and the other being the soundtrack to the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Ah, Skyward Sword. First shown at last year’s E3 conference, speculation was running rampant as to whether this game would be moving to the Wii’s successor, the Wii U. Shigeru Miyamoto, created of the Zelda series reassured the E3 showgoers that the game would be on Wii, and would be here this year. To top it off, they released this beautiful trailer…

Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. I’m hyped up, how about you? I would have loved a compilation disc of the older Zelda titles, but Nintendo is pulling out every other stop, so I can forgive them for omitting that.