But OOT was a AAA title already, and there were already several wildly successful Zelda games before OOT too. There's so many reasons why Zelda is, if anything, a counterexample to this phenomenon.
I wondered about that line too. As big a hit as OOT was, it just barely beats LTTP once all the re-releases are considered. The original NES game was comparable. Link's Awakening (1993) stopped just short of 10 million, beating them all.
Then there's Breath of the Wild (2017) running laps around them at 30 million. The sequel just came out and it's already at 10 as of numbers released in the first week.
