It's nothing new for game designers and artists to borrow liberally from Hollywood.
For example, the cover of '80s shoot-'em-up Contra basically took from the xenomorph from Alien, Arnold Schwarzenegger from Commando and Sylvester Stallone from Rambo. The original Metal Gear cover used Michael Biehn from Terminator as a guide for Solid Snake.
Liu Kang and Johnny Cage from Mortal Kombat were based on Bruce Lee and Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Balrog from Street Fighter was based on Mike Tyson. In fact, the reason why M. Bison was called that was over fears of Tyson suing Capcom on the US release.
We've totally digressed from the point of this story, but it's important to point out that game artists and designers regularly copy from real-life. A new art book on the early sketches and designs of Nintendo's most well-known franchise outside of Super Mario has pointed out a particularly interesting tidbit of information.
According to an interview in the book - Legend of Zelda: Art & Artifacts - the original design for Link in the Nintendo 64 classic, Ocarina Of Time, was based on a very well-known Hollywood actor.
Here's the promo image in question from Ocarina Of Time for reference.
Kotaku - which discovered the interview from the book - points out that it's most likely Leonardo DiCaprio because, well, he was popular in the late '90s and the hair around the time of Titanic and Romeo & Juliet is kind of similar. Other possible names included Tom Cruise in Legend, however the interview doesn't specifically name the actor.
Our guess? Steve Buscemi.
Via Kotaku