Nintendo Is Running Two Directs on Back to Back Days
The schedule, first
Nintendo's Direct page lists the two broadcasts side by side. The first starts September 8 at 7am PT and runs about 30 minutes, built around the 40th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda. The second starts a day later, September 9, at the same hour, and runs about 45 minutes. Same slot, two mornings in a row.
After the September 9 broadcast, Nintendo Treehouse: Live follows. The page says it shows gameplay of select titles that appeared during the Direct. A Direct moves through one game after another in a hurry, so that is where you go when something catches your eye.
You can watch it later, and almost nobody does
The video stays up afterwards. Within minutes of the last announcement someone has the whole thing written down in a list. People pile in at the start time anyway.
The first time through only happens once. Not knowing what comes next for 30 or 45 minutes is the part you cannot get back, and running a few hours late means the answer finds you first. A chat window flipping over all at once on a single reveal only exists live.
7am PT is 10am on the East Coast, which drops both of these into the middle of a school or work morning. Watching in the evening is a perfectly good plan. The video is not going anywhere.
The first game, forty Februaries ago
The 40 in the name comes from the first game in the series. The Legend of Zelda came out in Japan on February 21, 1986 for the Family Computer Disk System, and reached North America on August 22, 1987 on the NES. That makes this year the fortieth.
Forty years also means the series is older than most of the people waiting for the broadcast. A game from back when your parents were in school is still filing news.
Doing the same thing at the same time
Half of what makes a Direct fun is not the contents, it is watching together. DoYou Daily Course on DoYouBox runs on the same trick. The course is fixed by the date, so everyone who plays today drives the same one. A run takes about 21 seconds, short enough to leave a score behind and hand it to a friend.
With a few minutes left before a stream starts, something you can drop mid game is easier. DoYou Cross ends the run the moment you clip a car or a river, so quitting costs nothing. Once the stream is on and the group chat gets loud, you can usually tell who answers first. My Texting Style Test splits that habit along two axes, how fast you reply and how you write it, and dropping your result back into the chat tends to get noisier than the stream.