Zelda: Breath of the Wild player risks total timeline collapse by bringing two versions of the Old Man together

News
By published

Don't think too hard about the lore explanation for this

One The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild player has reunited the Old Man encountered at the start of the game with… the other Old Man you meet a bit later. 

Reddit user ThornyFox took on this particular reality-breaking challenge (as The Gamer spotted). The Old Man appears in several different locations on the map, and as ThornyFox proved, they actually exist as separate NPCs who can be brought together with a whole lot of shoving. I don't even want to know how long it took ThornyFox to pull this off – but hopefully not as long as this Genshin Impact player spent building a glitchy sea bridge in another feat of game-defying ingenuity. 

I will say, I've never seen the Old Man and the Old Man in the same room together, so this was nagging at me. And as ThornyFox pointed out in a Reddit comment, it's actually possible to gather more than two of the Old Man in one spot – you can apparently get all four if you really set your mind to it. Without going into spoilers, the story of the game makes it clear that the Old Man is more than what he seems, and this is yet more evidence that you should never underestimate Hyrule's Old Man network. 

Breath of the Wild remains a bottomless well of discoveries, exploits, and oddities. In the past few weeks alone, players have found a way to open a chest long thought impossible and snag the Master Sword way before you're supposed to using only a campfire. 

At this rate, we'll get Breath of the Wild 2 before we ever stop seeing new things come out of the original game. 

Austin Wood
Austin Wood
Senior writer

Austin has been a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.