10 Secret Video Game Areas You Weren't Meant To Find

6. The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past's Chris Houlihan Room

Legend Of Zelda A Link To The Past Chris Houlihan Room
Nintendo

Contests that allow the winner to snag a cameo in a video game are nothing new, with plenty of big games getting their fans in on the action over the years.

But one of the earliest examples revolves around The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, which is notable for the fact that the fan cameo in question was programmed in such a way that it was never intended to be discovered via normal gameplay.

This story began in the early 1990s, when Nintendo Power magazine held a competition that would give one lucky winner the chance to have their name appear in an upcoming game. That game turned out to be 1992's A Link To The Past, and the winner of the contest was an individual named Chris Houlihan.

But the thing is, nobody was able to track down Chris's name, because the game he would be appearing in wasn't actually revealed at the time. Plus - as we mentioned - the room isn't accessible through normal gameplay, and was instead meant as a crash prevention measure, making it even more elusive.

Players who did stumble across Chris's room were greeted with a message that reads "My name is Chris Houlihan. This is my top secret room. Keep it between us, okay?" along with 45 blue rupees scattered across the floor. In the decades since, other methods of reaching this place have been discovered, but curiously, any mention of Chris has been removed from all of the game's ports.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!