The Truth About Chris Houlihan

You've probably already heard or read the above quote, more or less similarly, whether on a Discord server, in a YouTube video, on a Zelda fan website, in a blog post, and so on. What's important to remember is that half of what's written above is either false or unverified.

The rumor

The rumor behind Chris Houlihan is based on a page from one of Nintendo Power magazine's editions, published in 1990, which presented a contest to its readers. This contest aimed to find an enemy with a very low appearance rate in the very first Final Fantasy on NES, then take a photo of it and send it to the magazine. The winner would then be randomly selected from the participants and would see their name appear in a future NES game. As you might suspect, still according to the rumor, a child named Chris Houlihan won this contest, and the game in which his name appeared is, of course, our beloved A Link to the Past.

Up to this point, it's a nice story, but when we look objectively, we have to face the facts: there's nothing very concrete. To begin with, the name of the game, or even the series, is never mentioned. The winner of the game could therefore have appeared in any game! Worse still, there's mention of an NES game. However, even if the A Link to the Past project was initially planned to be an NES game, it was in 1989 that its trajectory changed for the Super Famicom... at least a year before the publication of this magazine issue.

We also see in the contest rules that the results would be sent to the winner by mail. Therefore, they were never made public, contrary to what one might think, and there is absolutely no link between this contest and the name Chris Houlihan appearing in A Link to the Past. But on the other hand, this doesn't entirely invalidate the rumor, and it's also entirely possible that the events unfolded exactly as they are recounted. One just needs to remain aware that today there's strictly no one who knows anything about it.

I almost want to apologize for being a spoilsport as I am here, but I prefer to state and explain the facts, rather than trying to be interesting by pretending to know the details of a story that is ultimately just a pile of rumors 😛.

How to Access the Room

Another part of the rumor implies that there are a certain number of different ways to access this sacred room, and I must admit I've seen just about everything: you have to start from the Sanctuary and travel a certain path in under 3 minutes, you have to pass through specific maps, there are holes for which access to the room works and others for which it doesn't...

Well, as of writing (2023), the game was released over 30 years ago now. Its source code leaked in July 2020, and a decompilation tool has existed for several years already. All this to say that the secret of Chris Houlihan's room has actually been known for years! And I'm going to explain it to you below.

First, you should know that there aren't 5 ways to access the room. Nor are there 10, or even 300. In fact, there is only one way to put yourself in a position to access this room. This all comes from how the access to this room is programmed, and it's actually quite simple to understand.

In the overworld, when you fall into a hole, the game calculates your position^* and if it corresponds to that of a hole with a destination, then you are sent to said destination, which is an underworld room (which includes houses, caves, dungeons, etc.). This destination value depends on each hole and is associated with a room (this is what is called the "Room ID").

^* What I call position here is not defined by Link's own coordinates but by those of the camera. This is important for what follows.

Now, what happens if you manage, through bugs, to trigger the destination calculation routine at a position where there is no hole? This question was also considered by the developers and, more importantly, they provided an answer: for this improbable case that shouldn't happen but you never know (wink wink), we'll set a default value (that is called a "failsafe" in computer jargon). That is, if by mistake the destination calculation routine is launched when you're at an unexpected position, it will teleport Link to the room determined by this default value, instead of crashing the game. This notion of failsafe is widely used in software development to make programs more robust.

As you've probably guessed, Chris Houlihan's room corresponds to this default value (it's hexadecimal value 0x03 to be exact). To get there, you simply need to find a way to trick the game and "desynchronize" Link's position relative to the overworld holes that lead to a destination. To do this, you need to find a way to desynchronize the camera, because as I mentioned a little earlier, the position calculated by the routine is primarily the camera's position.

And to do this, there aren't just 5 ways as you might hear here and there, and it's not limited to just a few holes. You can access the secret room through all the holes in the overworld and in as many ways as your imagination / knowledge of the game engine allows. Below is an example of what was used in speedrunning in one of the categories to access it: you jump into the water 4 times to desynchronize the camera enough so that when you fall into the nearby hole right after, the game defaults to the value of Chris Houlihan's room.

Since we're talking about speedrunning, there is a category whose goal is to access Chris Houlihan's room as quickly as possible. As of writing, the record is under 80 seconds. You probably won't see this method in the usual list of 5 methods 😇.

Once you have collected the 225 rupees that Chris Houlihan's room gives you and you leave it, the game sends you back to the entrance of Link's house. This is no coincidence, as it is the very first overworld environment accessible to you in the game and it remains so throughout the game. Therefore, the developers made sure that even if you manage to trigger the "bug" very early in your game, upon leaving the failsafe room you will not be taken to a place where you are not supposed to be.

And on GBA?

In the GBA version, it's often said that Chris Houlihan's room has been made inaccessible but that it still exists in the game's data and can only be accessed via an Action Replay code. What's the truth? I won't keep you in suspense long; there's a bit of truth and a bit of falsehood. Let's unravel it all.

The GBA version is much less popular and consequently much less studied than the SNES version, and for this reason, I'm not sure anyone has bothered to create a program that can decompile its source code. Nevertheless, due to the aspect ratio difference between an SNES game (8:7) and a GBA game (3:2), it seems obvious that anything related to the camera must have been completely reprogrammed. As I explained above, the camera's position is an essential component in accessing Chris Houlihan's room, and these changes mean that camera desynchronization methods no longer work.

That said, not everything has changed in the GBA version, and if you're somewhat familiar with the game's speedrunning, you've surely heard of the Exploration Glitch, or the EG Map. If you're not familiar, I briefly mentioned it above, but to put it simply, most indoor rooms (dungeons, caves, houses, etc.) are gathered in a single immense map (aptly called "the EG Map"), and Chris Houlihan's room is therefore also within it (at index 0x03 as I mentioned).

If I'm telling you all this, it's because this entire layout has been preserved on GBA and the EG Map returns as is. Consequently, even if we can no longer access the secret room via holes in the overworld with camera desynchronization, we can still access it via somewhat complicated glitches that involve room transitions. As of writing, to my knowledge, only one person, a glitch hunter from the ALTTP speedrun community, has bothered to perform these glitches on the GBA version and thus was able to access Chris Houlihan's room. The conclusion to all this is that Chris Houlihan's room is accessible without cheat codes / Action Replay on GBA.

Now that we've said that, let's delve a bit more into its content. It differs from the SNES secret room in two ways:

• The floor is no longer carpeted in blue but retains the patterns of a normal cave
• The telepathic plaque has been removed, de facto removing the reference to Chris Houlihan

What the secret room truly contains

What, you thought we were done with Chris Houlihan's room? Not yet, there's still one more secret to discover 😄. The name "Chris Houlihan" is only present in the English version of the game. In French, what does it say?

For a long time, the Chris Houlihan name was thought to be just a reference from the English version that hadn't been translated into other languages, because the contest was exclusively American. But that's forgetting that the original version is not American, but Japanese! And now, what does it say in the Japanese version?

Here's a literal translation by me:

Disappointed? If yes, then I invite you to reread the 2nd line.

^* Small note: In Japanese, the telepathic plaque doesn't specify that the room in question is "his" room, so we have no information about the character speaking through this plaque: it could be Sahasrahla, it could be an external narrator to the game, it could also be... a Moblin?!?

Remember Zelda 1. We had hidden caves where we could find Moblins giving us rupees with the famous phrase "It's a secret to everybody". This phrase is iconic among Zelda fans, but it is actually the English translation of the original text! In Japan, not only does the easter egg exist as well, but there are also many occurrences in the series where it hasn't been correctly translated, thus losing the easter egg in non-Japanese versions. The room attributed to Chris Houlihan is, in fact, just a nod to the famous "It's a secret to everybody".