Did You Know Gaming says Ocarina of Time's 99 Metacritic score is miscalculated

Did You Know Gaming, the YouTube channel known for digging up overlooked gaming history, has published a video arguing that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's legendary 99 Metacritic score is built on a flawed foundation — and that the real number should be 98.

The channel's case rests on two specific problems with how Metacritic compiled the game's 22 reviews. First, DYKG found that Metacritic included perfect scores from EGM and GamePro but skipped other publications it regularly uses for Zelda games — including Game Informer and Nintendo Power, which gave Ocarina of Time a 95. Second, some of the included write-ups aren't really reviews at all: pieces that simply call the game "perfect" without a numerical score, plus retrospectives published well after the 1998 launch. DYKG is careful to say none of this looks intentional — tracking down every back issue of every magazine in the early 2000s was genuinely difficult — but argues the errors still count. Running the numbers by Metacritic's own rounding rules (anything from 97.5 up rounds to 98), DYKG lands at 97.6, which rounds to 98, not 99.

That one-point drop matters more than it sounds. A 98 would knock Ocarina of Time off its sole top spot and into a four-way tie for second place alongside Grand Theft Auto IV, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Soulcalibur. Metacritic's all-time number-one ranking has real-world weight — Ocarina of Time holds Guinness World Records tied directly to that score, including Most Critically Acclaimed Videogame, and those records would also be called into question. Metacritic has been the dominant review aggregator for games since the early 2000s, and its scores have historically influenced everything from developer bonuses to publisher decisions, making the integrity of its historical data more than a trivia argument.

DYKG stops short of demanding Metacritic correct the score, but the implication is clear. Whether Metacritic responds — or whether Guinness revisits its records — remains to be seen.