Saturday Night Live used its October 4 Weekend Update segment to put Grand Theft Auto 6‘s Jason Duval and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake’s Link on the same stage for a six-minute argument about which game is better.
Marcello Hernández played Jason and Mikey Day played Link, while Colin Jost and Michael Che anchored the desk. According to IGN’s report, the sketch leaned hard on jokes about stealing cars, buying RPGs and solving puzzles in Hyrule, with the two protagonists mostly trading insults and defending their own games.
Jason and Link turn up at Weekend Update
The bit stood out even for a show that has occasionally worked in gaming references. Here, though, SNL went straight for two of November 2026’s biggest releases and treated them as if they were already mainstream pop-culture fixtures. The episode was hosted by Dakota Johnson, had Turnstile as musical guest and included a surprise cameo from Taylor Swift, but the game sketch still became the part that drew the loudest reaction from gaming fans online.
Jost opened the segment with a line that set the tone for the whole sketch:
“Now, I don’t know much about gaming because I’ve had sex,”
before joking that people were calling the pair the “Barbenheimer of video games.”
That setup made the sketch’s approach clear almost immediately. It was not trying to dig into the specifics of either series so much as play with the broadest possible idea of them: GTA as car theft and crime, Zelda as puzzles and fantasy quests. For a general audience, the premise was easy to follow. For fans who know both franchises well, it left very little room for nuance.
IGN’s report says Jason’s role was reduced mostly to waving around an RPG and stealing cars over and over, while Link spent much of the time yelling about puzzles and insisting that his tunic was not a dress. That made the sketch feel less like a matchup between two distinct characters and more like a shorthand version of gaming culture itself.
The visual side of the gag got more attention than the writing. Day’s Link costume was praised by some fans for being surprisingly close to the specific tunic from the Ocarina of Time remake, complete with elf ears and a convincing wig. Hernández’s Jason, by contrast, was described as closer to a last-minute Halloween outfit, with a bloody bandage and a tropical button-up doing most of the work.
That difference mattered because the sketch depended so much on instant recognition. Link’s look clearly signaled the character, while Jason’s outfit gave viewers less to latch onto beyond the most obvious GTA cues. The report says some fans felt that left Jason shortchanged, especially since the jokes around him stayed close to the same car-theft and weapon gags the series has been associated with for years.
Fan reaction split between the costume work and the jokes
Online reaction, as gathered by IGN, was mixed-to-negative overall. One fan said they still watched SNL most weeks but thought the sketch was “pretty rough,” while another asked whether these were really jokes people had not already heard for about 20 years. On Reddit, u/HotHoneyMustardFan called the segment “a complete disregard for specificity in service of surface level nonsense.”
Not every comment was dismissive. One of the more positive responses said the sketch was funny, but also asked how the show was parodying a character audiences do not know especially well yet. That comment gets at a difference between the two characters onstage: Link comes with decades of cultural history, while Jason is still new enough that many viewers have only a narrow impression of him so far.
The complaints were not just about the premise. Several reactions focused on the writing falling back on old assumptions about gaming, especially the idea that players are sexually inexperienced or socially awkward. That kind of joke has been around for years, and the sketch’s reliance on it left some viewers feeling as if the show had little new to say about either game.
Reaction on social media also suggested that the crowd’s response was uneven. IGN says the audience cheered louder for Zelda and for the puzzle jokes than for other parts of the bit, which some viewers took as a sign that Link was landing better with the live crowd than Jason was. That Week In SNL posted that the sketch kept circling back to the same old gaming punchlines, while An Average Gamer – N argued that the show was trying too hard to make Link and Zelda look like “nerd shit.”
The segment’s timing gave it extra context. Games big and small have mostly moved out of November 2026 to avoid competing with GTA 6, and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is the biggest exception to that pattern. The two releases are also headed to different systems, with Zelda coming to Nintendo Switch 2 and GTA 6 landing on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
IGN notes that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is set for November 5, while GTA 6 follows on November 19. That calendar explains why the sketch arrived when it did: both games are now close enough to be part of the same conversation, even though they sit in very different genres and on very different platforms.
A broad joke built on two very different games
The sketch worked as a straightforward late-night gag because the premise was so easy to grasp. Put Jason and Link in the same room, have them argue about their respective games, and the audience can fill in the blanks. But the same simplicity also limited the bit. There was not much room for anything beyond car theft, RPGs, puzzles and a few jokes about how gamers are perceived outside the hobby.
For Zelda fans, the costume detail may have been the highlight. For GTA fans, the sketch apparently offered less beyond the obvious crime angle. And for viewers looking for sharper writing, the whole segment felt like a reminder that mainstream comedy still tends to reach for the same handful of gaming stereotypes when games become late-night material.
That reaction, more than the individual punchlines, defined how the bit landed after the episode aired.
The appearance also showed how quickly both titles have become part of the broader November release conversation. The sketch did not need much explanation because the games themselves already carry enough cultural weight to work as shorthand, even if the jokes surrounding them were familiar enough to draw eye-rolls from fans.
IGN’s report also points to the odd contrast at the center of the segment: one character built from a decades-old fantasy icon, the other from a still-unreleased crime game. That mismatch gave SNL an easy comedy setup, but it also meant the sketch had to rely on broad generalities instead of anything especially specific to the new GTA entry.
In the end, the show gave gaming fans a late-night cameo that was easy to recognize and easy to argue about. The costume accuracy, the recycled jokes and the crowd reaction all became part of the conversation as soon as the sketch aired.
“I’ve had sex” is wild lol
The Link costume getting the better reactions says a lot. If the outfit does more work than the writing, the joke is already half dead.
or maybe zelda just has better visual shorthand than gta guy in a shirt
Fair, but that’s kind of the point i’m making. Link has a fixed look that people clock instantly, while Jason is still too new for a lazy costume to carry him. If the bit is built on broad game stereotypes anyway, at least give the newer character something sharper than ‘bandage and loud shirt’.