With almost 40 years of history, dozens of games, and a story that spans millennia across multiple consoles, figuring out the timeline for The Legend of Zelda isn't easy. While some games play fast and loose with Link's journey across the ages, several constant themes can be found in these beloved titles.

From 1986's The Legend of Zelda through to 2023's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, join GameSpot as we piece together the lore and timeline of this series in this episode of Timeline, which has one of the most infamously complex chronologies in all of video games.

From time travel to time skips, prequels to sequels, and several spin-offs between major chapters in the saga, fitting all of these pieces together into a single cohesive timeline is challenging. Recent and official resources, like Hyrule Historia, have made this task easier, but at the same time, 2017's Breath of the Wild added a Ganondorf-sized spanner to the effort by blurring the lines between myths, fairy tails, and legends.