Nintendo fans have been pursuing an unsolved mystery for decades, ever since the 1992 launch of the North American version of stone-cold, Super NES classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The question: "Who is Chris Houlihan?" The answer: Some guy who never really cared about the whole thing to begin with.
There's a hidden room in A Link to the Past, created by the developers as a sort of failsafe when you make a glitched entrance to an underground cave – if there's an error in calculating Link's position, he'll appear in a secret room filled with rupees. Numerous repeatable methods to enter the room have been documented.
The room includes a sign saying, basically, that this is a secret room. In the North American version, specifically, however, it says this: "My name is Chris Houlihan. This is my top secret room. Keep it between us, OK?" Some players spent years trying to figure out why Chris Houlihan was in the game, but that answer was pretty simple: he won a 1990 contest from Nintendo Power magazine. That fact was ultimately confirmed by Nintendo Power much later, in a 1998 writeup of an entirely different contest.
Nevertheless, a sense of mystery about Chris Houlihan persisted, especially since you'd think somebody actively entering Nintendo Power contests in the '90s would be pretty excited about getting their name in a SNES game. Yet nobody knew who Chris Houlihan really was – until the YouTube video below dropped.
Here, Kevin Hainline explains how he came to meet Chris Houlihan. If you're hooked on the mystery so far, I'd recommend just watching the video, as Hainline lays out a compelling narrative about his encounter with the mystery man, and his own skepticism about the guy's identity. But, in short, Chris Houlihan isn't the guy who won the contest.
Instead, Chris's dad was the gamer of the family, and he was the one who won the Nintendo Power contest and submitted his son's name for inclusion in a future game. Chris doesn't really seem to care about the whole thing.
"I met Chris once," Hainline explains. "He was at an event I was also at. My parents flagged him over and we talked. Nice guy. Not a video game player. Very little interest or excitement about having his name in a video game."
Chris revealed an old letter signed by Nintendo Power editor Scott Pelland, where it's revealed that Chris' first name was included as a player name in Nintendo World Cup – the Game Boy version. But, according to Pelland, that "was not nearly enough."
"So, what are we doing now?" Pelland continued. "Well, we have contacted Mr. Miyamoto in Kyoto, Japan. He's the guy who created the character of Mario and designed most of the Mario and Zelda games. It is our hope that your name will be given to a good character in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which by the way, is the name of the future Super NES Zelda game."
Imagine you're a kid in the early '90s, and you've just learned not only that Shigeru Miyamoto himself is going to put you in the next Zelda game – you've also learned what the name of the next Zelda game is going to be. That's a thrill, right? The problem, of course, is that it seems Chris never really cared.
Hainline had plenty of skepticism about Chris's story, so he reached out directly to Pelland about the letter. "I think the note is authentic," Pelland wrote back, "although I don't have a direct recollection of it. The facts regarding Chris, his dad and the contest as you have stated them seem correct, as well. I recall there being a delay in getting Chris's name into a game, and we had to work with [Nintendo Co., Ltd] to get it into A Link to the Past. The fact that the note was from me also suggests that it is authentic since I ran the contest in those days."
For me, that's every aspect of the mystery solved to my full satisfaction. Though, I suppose you could start asking if Hainline is telling the full truth here. Why would you doubt his story? I don't know, but then, I don't know why you would doubt Houlihan's story, or the Nintendo Power articles, or anything else about this ultimately inconsequential mystery.
Houlihan, as Hainline puts it, is "just some guy. He isn't interested in glory. He doesn't really care about the name being used in Nintendo World Cup or Link to the Past. He's just out there in the world living his life. He's not a fraud. He's not a fake. It's not a fake name Nintendo built and put into the game to trick people. All of your theories were wrong. He's a real guy and his name is in two games, which is kind of fun."
Would A Link to the Past still top our list of the best SNES games without Chris Houlihan's involvement? I mean, obviously, yes, but his name still gives the classic a little extra sense of mystery.
