I remember when I was little playing Super Smash Bros. on the N64 yelling at the announcer that his name was Zelda not Link. . .I've come so far.

i remember the time when i didn't know what legend of zelda was. I saw the poster and saw Link, so I thought, 'So that's Zelda.'

a lot of people who don't follow the series just assumed zelda was link's name since you were playing as him through out the games. or so i think.

A lot of it stemmed from the original Legend of Zelda. Back in the good old days of the NES, most of a game's story was written in the instruction manual. However, not many people actually read the manual. (Sad how things don't change over time) Since they didn't read the manual and see Link's name printed...what 5 dozen times?, and the game was named "Zelda," they just assumed the green blob of blocks was the titular character. Ignorance and laziness won out and Link's name was believed to be Zelda for many, many years.

And that's why you shouldn't assume things...

I never had this issue, I was addicted to manual reading as a kid. Cause of the little neat pictures inside.

Even if I never played the game when it was first released I had read the summary of the story at the advertisements so I knew that Link was the hero. And I also knew that Samus was a woman since she was mentioned at the advertisements as "she".

to be fair in the OLD games, there was little times when town characters or NPC's actually refer to him as link, at least thats how I remember it

Makes me wonder why they didn't name it "Legend of Link" instead.

There's a theory that goes, with events in Skyward Sword,

something crossed my mind...
yukkuri link