It seems Nintendo wasn't just pushing our buttons the whole time. They may have had some messy mistakes in how they went about portraying their games in chronological order, but they apparently did have something in store for us. Cheating a little bit, it turns out Nintendo took a technically non-in-game order, making a split in the timeline not only for when Link goes back in time at the end of OoT, but apparently also after the player gets a game over. Alternatively, a split that happens when Navi hit the fence and died from the impact at the beginning of the game, presumably making Link sleep in and miss fulfilling his destiny. That was a joke.

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In this image created by a fan on Kotaku, we see a logically sound timeline in which Link being defeated at the end of [i]Ocarina of Time[/i] causes the creation of the Dark World in [i]Link to the Past[/i]. If you're wondering why Hyrule is peaceful at the beginning of [i]Link to the Past[/i], it's because Ganondorf was sealed before the game took place, as per the introduction story.

I find it interesting that all their older games seemed to be grouped together on the third timeline split.

This information was released in Nintendo's book, [url="http://images.wikia.com/zelda/images/4/43/Hyrule_Historia.png"][i]Hyrule Hystoria[/i][/url][i], [/i]for the Legend of Zelda's 25th Anniversary. There are no known plans for release of this book in other countries.