GTA 6 vs. Zelda Is Gaming's Barbenheimer, and Link Is the Barbie

Nintendo's Ocarina of Time remake arrives Nov. 5, two weeks before Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 6 lands on Nov. 19.

On "Saturday Night Live," Jason, the hero of Grand Theft Auto 6, ran through his day: a prison break, a bank robbery and a stolen Boeing Dreamliner. Link wasn't impressed. Over in Hyrule, he'd bought magic beans from a shopkeeper and played his ocarina.

That Weekend Update bit, with Marcello Hernández as Jason and Mikey Day as Link, was SNL's take on the matchup people have started calling the Barbenheimer of video games, NME reported. Nintendo's remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time comes out Nov. 5. Rockstar Games' GTA 6 follows on Nov. 19, after several delays.

Hernández's Jason waved off the comparison. "Nah, the only way this is like 'Barbenheimer' is that I blow stuff up. And [Link] looks like a little blonde girl," he told host Colin Jost on SNL.

It was a joke, and it also handed out the parts. The original Barbenheimer, in 2023, put Barbie, a Hollywood blockbuster, in theaters against Christopher Nolan's historical thriller Oppenheimer. SNL has now done the casting for November: Rockstar gets the explosions, and Nintendo gets the blonde.

The explosion movie has the budget to match. GTA 6 is reportedly the costliest video game ever made. Industry executives expect fans to skip work on launch day, and Rockstar recently confirmed that the new map is twice the size of GTA 5's.

Several other games moved their release dates to get out of its way. Nintendo went the other direction and parked a remake of a 1998 game two weeks in front of it.

That's the whole case for Zelda this fall. One game wants to be the biggest thing in the room. The other is selling a shopkeeper, a bag of beans and a tune on an ocarina, an escape that's optimistic almost on principle. In a month built around the most expensive crime spree in gaming, that's the counterprogramming worth rooting for.

Zelda fans are already dreaming past launch. Some think the remake will end with word of an updated take on 2000's The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Rockstar's audience is measuring a bigger map, while Nintendo's is hoping for another trip back.

The sketch closed with each hero's pitch to America. Jason's on SNL was "Destruction, chaos and sex." Link answered with "puzzles and light combat," and against everything Jason was selling, that isn't the weaker hand. It's the Barbie one.

Source: nme.com, retrieved October 7, 2026.