The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is in the wild.
Over the weekend, physical copies of Tears of the Kingdom appear to have landed in the hands of buyers two weeks before its scheduled May 12 release date. Photos of the collector's edition appeared on 4chan, while at least two copies of the game appeared on the Mercari online marketplace. The leak has now escalated to streams on Twitch, Discord, and smaller streaming sites, as early players share brief glimpses at the game before their streams abruptly go offline.
PC Gamer has identified what appear to be pirated copies of Tears of the Kingdom on various torrent sites by following links on 4chan, shared in a file format consistent with Switch cartridge copies. We can't confirm those files are genuine, but given the proliferation of streams, the game is almost certainly already being distributed illegally. There is also at least one file of pre-rendered scenes from Tears of the Kingdom that do link, albeit in .webm format with no audio.
That file will likely be taken offline by a Nintendo copyright strike before long. So far the broadcasts seem to be online only for a few minutes in Kick and Meeting , often using the gag title "playing Horizon", a callback to Sony's Horizon Zero Dawn release a few days before Breath of the Wild. While much smaller than Twitch, neither of these two streaming platforms is exactly underground: Kick was launched in recent months by controversial streamer Trainwreck as a gambling-friendly alternative to Twitch, while Trovo is owned by Tencent.
According to Kotaku , Tears of the Kingdom streams have also appeared in a more private place: the Discord servers. One of the largest has already been closed. But with nearly two full weeks to go before release, Nintendo's copyright enforcement teams will have their work cut out for them.
Several 4chan posters have also uploaded screenshots and short videos of Tears of the Kingdom running on the Ryujinx Switch emulator, running between 20 and 30 fps. Another seems to show the game playable on a Steam Deck. That seems to answer our question of if Tears of the Kingdom will be playable through emulation on day one . But both Switch emulators, Ryujinx and Yuzu, maintain strict stances against piracy, which means that patches from either emulator are unlikely to directly target Tears of the Kingdom until after its official release. The Discord servers for both emulators currently have bold red warnings in their channel threads:
"Requesting copyrighted content (Firmwares/Games/Keys/Shaders) is prohibited," says Ryujinx.
Yuzu's is even simpler: "Hacking is not allowed."
