Nintendo actually made a joke about the Pink haired link in Tri-Force Heroes. Theres a person outside of the castle who has the same get-up as LTTP Link. Including the pink hair. Unfortunately he can't get in the castle because he doesn't have pointy ears!
Yeahh, since I really like Tri Force Heroes, I was hoping that he would mention that when he talked about potential future easter eggs related to pink haired Link. It is a very good video anyway.
It kinda happened. For Super Mario Maker someone did an interview with an og nintendo director or supervisor, and they basically said that Bowser wasn't supposed to have the design it has in Super Mario World. And he didn't noticed until the creation of SMM. Can't find the original interview, so i can't tell if I'm being wrong, so sorry if it's the case.
I'm also confident it's for contrast, yellow would blend with the cap's brim and brown is already use for skin shadows. So the pink was different enough for us to know it's the hair. A lot of games in that time also has this kind of change between artwork and ingame sprite, it's purely for better readability.
Looking back it's amazing all the limitations they had to work around to give us something visually appealing. It's easy to say ''oh they should have made the background darker'' or something when we have no clue the hues available due to the color output of crts. I'm always amazed how far tvs have come in their ability to display colors. I loved doing art on them over computer monitors. The big size was also a great help for my blind self XD I like how the pink bunny looked ethereal, and it felt like a hint to his cute fluffy other self. That's how I reasoned the pink hair difference, but I don't remember having access to the game manual. I believe we rented this game a few times and rented games rarely included manuals then. But I remember seeing the artwork the more I explored online. Never really crossed my mind until this video XD
This. Also, no-one back in the day mentioned his hair being pink. Everyone read the color as light brown because of the interaction with the other colors surrounding it.
Also blue, pink and yellow are what we call a "color harmony". These colors look pleasing to the eye - you might've seen websites, apps or posters where the main colors are pink, blue and yellow.
@@ShinoSarna yeah, think it s called a triadic color scheme (if autocorrect doesn't bug it up) same effect with purple, green and orange. I read link (now at least) as red, blue, green. The color of lighted monitors, colors representing the triforce...probably just another zonal swirl, but it might explain why pink and not any other color. They seem to like to play off the contemplative thoughts of teammates as ''hur dur we tried it and worked!'' It'd be nice if they shared, but I'll figure out that trick on my own if I have to. Goofballs.
I remember hearing the main reason Mega Man was green in Captain N is because the artist who was researching the games had an old TV and he honestly thought the blue bomber was green because of how the TV made the games looked
does the same apply to that weird king hippo color scheme? i always just kind of assumed these people never even played the games, cause how do you even get something so simple wrong like that
@@coralimes3074 I honesty don't know. I just remember an interview out there of an artist who did a very early version of Captain N and he only played Megaman for one night.
@@coralimes3074 captain n was made on sone heavy restrictions, Nintendo wasn't willing to send them official artwork or any real guidelines to character designs ,so half the character had to be made via box art only or just guess work , such as mother brain and king hippo, hell the reason eggplant mage was there was because they weren't aware about medusa , another thing was they wanted include alucard from the at the time new castlevaina games...but because the only reference they had was darculas son and draculas apparence in the box art, his design looks nothing like it supposed to , Essentially captain n was a consequence of Nintendo not caring, why would they ? They already had a success mario and zelda show in the west anyways
@@maverickdarkrath4780 Interesting, makes sense. Ya know, despite all of this, it's funny the show ended up being pretty fantastic in a quarky alternative dimension way.
Regardless of actual canonicity, I absolutely love the idea of this little man running around in a world devoid of hair dye inexplicably having pink hair, and nobody questioning it.
Growing up playing ALttP on a crappy CRT, I never noticed Link's hair was pink. The combination of low graphic quality and surrounding colors, it looked light brown to me (light brown, not tunic brown). When I was informed his hair was pink, I was shocked. Sure enough, it was all this time, so a combination of the latter theory presented here as well as pink bunny (which always looked pink even on crappy CRTs) made the most sense to me.
Same here. I played a lot on old TVs and never noticed the pink haired. It was just a thing for me when I started playing on PC, but I thought it was a bug in the ROM
I love how you mentioned the existence of the way CRTs worked, because the first thing I noticed about those screen shots, was that they were actual real "shots of the screen", and that the hair actually looked just a tiny bit brown. What's funny is, I definitely remember the hair still looking a little pink on CRTs back in the day. I almost want to say that it might have to be something with the way Japanese CRTs work over American ones, because something I remember very vividly was getting to edit the Mario World sprites in Mario Paint, and getting get a VERY close look at them with the stamp editor. You look at those, and discover that a lot of Mario's sprites actually have purple in them! Mario World was a launch title, and A Link to the Past was released only a year later. Considering advancements between these two games isn't too far off, I imagine the skills they used for creating the sprites with whatever limitations they had used a similar process.
@@nowonmetube That's because the color palette is limited, so they had to use skin color for highlights in blonde hair a lot. Even Street Fighter Zero/Alpha series from PS1 times had skin color for blonde.
never knew it was pink, it always appeared to be like peach 🍑 colored on my CRT TV. it wasn't until i played a ROM on my computer when i could see the sprite, pixels, and the colors crystal clear. at that moment i realized the hair always looked light tan or 🍑 peach-colored on my CRT because it was always actually pink. that's a neat color hack on Nintendo's part.
I think that the simple reason why is that if his hair was light brown like most of the art of link, then it would worsen the sprite’s readability. This goes not just on small crt tvs, but in general. If his hair was light brown it would blend in too well with his skin or his hat’s rim. Pink can be used in a stylized way to represent blonde in a similar way that yellow is. The brown hair looks good in an illustration, but with pixel art it gets lost easily. Color is so much more important. You need to make things stand out or they will get lost in the visual clutter.
Also the SNES only could have so many different colors of pixels, 256 not counting black and white, and many of those had to be one of three or four slightly lighter or darker versions of the same base color for use in the shading effects that made the SNES stand out. Meaning in actuality the SNES had probably around 64 ACTUAL individual colors to work with for EVERYTHING, and so the only pixels they had even CLOSE to Link's artwork hair color were already in use for, say, the dirt, like you said. So they had to do something else to still put Link's hair in but also not make it blend and vanish any time he was over, say, dirt, just like you said. The solution they chose was to use bright pink, a color I don't think they used anywhere else but on certain sprite models, namely Link and Bunny Link. If there were others I can't remember.
For his hair color in the old mangas, I imagine they colored it pink/purple/magenta to complement his tunic and for the same reason tons of anime have very colorful hair; to make the character look unique. It's really interesting to think that the sprite was changed to allow playability. I've had a large CRT ever since I was a kid, so I never imagined that Link blending into the background would have been such an issue. If Nintendo never makes an official statement, I think you've done a good job of closing the books on the mystery.
I honestly never realized that he had pink hair in this game, I always thought that the pink was a part of his hat but I played this on gba and was looking at a smaller sprite than if I was looking at it on a tv
It's most likely for the old CRTs of the time IMO. The CRT TV I first played LTTP on was in fact from the late 70s/early 80s and compared to newer CRTs of the time, the colors were not as vibrant and the image had pixels and most fine details blurring together. The pink hair on that type of screen really never stood out as pink hair. It really just looked close to light brown. I actually never noticed Link had pink hair in the game until I emulated it on a PC and that was when I discovered I missed out on a LOT of little details in the game.
Similar experience here when I got access to the internet I found out about pink haired link and actually dug my old SNES out to plug into a newer tv and went huh neat. it looked redish brown back then to me
@@Nathan-qp9uv I can totally see that. Depending on the TV, you got variations of how things were blurred together and if a TV was on it's last legs and the tint was way off and couldn't be fixed, it would make sonic look green. ;)
As a kid i just figured it was light brown. Didnt bother me in the slightest because it was common back in the nes/snes days to not have game graphics and colors match artwork
I asked myself "why pink? Couldn't they made him blonde? That stands out just as well" until i remembered, his hair was never blonde until way later on the N64. In hindsight blonde works better but pink is closer to his light brown/caramel hair in official artwork.
Actually ALttP Link's hair was always canonically blonde in the artwork. It was just a darker shade of blonde that is unfortunately commonly mistook for light brown called dirty blonde. Also, there's people who think that OoT Link's hair is orange. So really, going by the logic of light brunette Link on SNES and Redhead Link on N64 or even not, Link didn't officially and undeniably have "true blonde" hair until Wind Waker on GameCube. However, that only applied to the new Toon version of Link, while the semi-realistic Link still always "light brown" or dirty blonde hair. That said, Link never actually had "true blonde" hair realistically. Not canonically anyways. So by the logic of most people, Link was still always either interpreted by many as being a brunette or redhead who only has blonde hair whenever he's portrayed in Toon Link form. Even though canonically, he's supposed be a dirty blonde. It makes more sense for him to be a dirty blonde because it contrasts better with how he's always portrayed as a peasant/traveler who always ventures around the world through the wildness, visiting towns and stuff, while Princess Zelda has lighter blonde hair as she is a more civilized regal person of authority and order. Link is a wild adventurer while Zelda is a regal princess. Hence the reason for Link's hair always being darker than Zelda's. Dirty blonde goes well with someone who isn't afraid to get their hands dirty while light blonde or true blonde fits better for someone is very important and pure. However, the only exceptions to this logic are Zelda I, Zelda II, Twilight Princess, BotW, and the new upcoming Tears of the Kingdom. Zelda in the first two games and TP is a brunette, while BotW/TotK Zelda has the same blonde hair as Link does in BotW/TotK but a slightly/barely a bit lighter. Other than that, Link and Zelda both are supposed to be canonically blonde.
There was actually a pink-haired female Link in a Zelda 1 guide in the Japanese Shonen Captain magazine from 1986, it was the first time that a pink-haired Link and a female Link were seen Also, in the latest Nintendo leak, there were a few official ALTTP concept arts of a pink-haired chibi Link made out of clay and many beta sprites where Link was already pink-haired, so fans think the plan was always for him to have pink hair in the game It's really strange that he doesn't on the official promotional artworks, maybe the market team thought it would be a bad idea, but the developers didn't want to make the change to the game itself
The chibis also could have just been concepts for the sprite with the change already made cause they knew the brown hair would be a problem going in. This devs probably learned from a few of the games that had been released at launch in the console's lifespan and adjusted appropriately since the game was going to use a lot of greens and browns, Link's main color scheme. It'd make sense that they'd want it on the concept art so the sprite artists would know and design it accordingly.
Unless I'm mistaken, I read somewhere many years ago that outside of video games pink hair is supposed to indicate strawberry blond in anime. I'm not sure why they do that in Japan, but it might be something to do with a limited colour pallet at the time and/or that strawberry blond looks too similar to red hair or something like that.
It's probably similar to how old comic books used blues to represent black hair. In this case though they could print it black, it's just that black ink was expensive at the time.
Interesting video, well done! I think your conclusion makes a lot of sense. I grew up playing A Link to the Past on the Gameboy Advanced, and on that tiny little screen kid me just assumed he had a pink brim on his hat and I never gave it anymore thought until I saw this video XD
I put a ton of hours into A Link to the Past back in the day and I never realized it was actually pink until modern era discussions of it started growing. Many many games back then had small tricks to deal with limitations, so I think I already had a strong habit of "interpreting" things. My mind only "knew" he had a normal hair color.
The pink looked like a light brown on my CRT, and it matched the English manual. The blue on the shield also looked like another shade of gray, like shiny and dull gray tones of the shield. Also the pink hair on those magazines was clearly sun damage, as on two of them his brown boots were also pink, and the red/brown moblins show as bright pink as well.
I figured it was a visual thing, and brown or blonde might have blended with the skin tone where there’s more going on with Link’s sprite, and pink stood out with the green. Given how there are areas of the overworld are green, the related complimentary color is a good choice to make the character stand out (kinda like Spyro being purple because his initial green version would have blended into the grass), despite his official art.
Nobody here ever played it on SNES on a CRT over an RF cable or composite? His hair doesn't look pink. It's an optical blending thing (mixing/blending of colors by proximity, via your eye + distortion of the CRT). You needed to have an insane TV AND video hookup back when the game was released to even notice the pink. It was a trick to make his hair distinct from his skin and his hat. It doesn't look pink… but it's hard to explain unless you've really seen it.
I always wondered about that as well. I had considered that it was part of his hat... but his sideburns were also pink. I assumed it was somehow a color limitation and just accepted it. However, I think that you are probably right about the tracking. You are also probably right in that we will only see it again in a cameo or something like that.
Knowing how much Japanese folks seem to love puns, it could even be as simple as it started as "Link" sounding like "Pink", Linku/Pinku. Both are borrowed words, so they'd be extra funny, enough to put it on the sprite as a gag and end up liking it for how much it stood out.
Great video! I could maybe see Nintendo adding a shop to dye Link's hair in a village or something for customization. Kinda like how you can dye certain tunics in BotW. There's also the character in Triforce Heroes at the Castle entrance, but I believe that was mostly a coincidence on the developers part, and not a straight reference to ALTTP.
Not just does it aid in tracking the character on the background but it also aids in making it easier to see the distinction between Link's hair and skin, which was also a light brown color
I think it also may have been pink for the benefit of being able to tell the exact direction Link is facing. Notice how distinct it makes the direction he's facing. But do agree it likely mainly is due to CRTs having indistinct pixels. Not just that, but CRTs also were able to combine near pixels to make new colors the system wasn't actually able to produce on its own. It allowed for smoother color gradients. The more chunky pixel look we see on games was far less pronounced on CRTs because of their indistinct pixel layout.
Considering there is a Dye Shop in BOTW to change your clothes colors, Its entirely reasonable to dye your hair. I was actually a little disappointed you couldn't.
I also wanna point out that his uncle in the game had a kind of vibrant looking blue hair, and I’m sure his parents had some cool hair colors too, there’s a possible theory for a story or lore reason for the hair tucked in there I’m sure lol
Actually we did get to see Pink Hair Link in a later game, well... sorta. I guess is technically more of an easter egg but in TriForce Heroes, the kid that complains about not being allowed in because of having round ears looks a lot like A Link to the Past Link and even has very similar hair color and clothing.
I think you may have the right of it. Pink hair stands out against darker backgrounds, and particularly against green; magenta and green are complimentary colors. By a similar token, in the original Castlevania game, Simon Belmont's sprite is medium oranges and browns, colors that offset well against the many dark blues in the game. Once again, yellow and blue are complimentary colors.
I think you're slot on, the technical need was tonmake Link's sprite pop. It was common practice for in-game art to not match the idealized external material art. But I think the specific colors might also have to do with Japanese culture. Because if you have to compromise your physical vision of the character, might as well make it symbolic, and the zelda franchise has always had deep multicultural influences - it is par for their game. Traditionally in Japan, blue is the common people's color, particularly their clothes, which Link wears on his gear. A hero from the people to the people. And a hero who is not one by birthright, but by what is in his head, the purple/violet/pink that is a color associated with the noble (at least in later romanticized ideation) samurai warrior. His mind makes him a warrior hero (and by extension of his silent protag self, you), not the conditions of his birth. It could as well be also a reference to The Flower of Edo (tl;dr; the main male actor and character of this famous cultural touch stone work is depicted in original artwork of the time witha distinctive purple hairband which link's sprite is a wee bit reminiscent of).
I can honestly say it wasn't something that i noticed before this. I grew up playing a link to the past. Thinking about it now actually hair color is something that just doesn't stick out to me as a detail about the character to remember at all. Trying to remember the hair color of a lot of my favorite video game characters just comes up blank.
To me it never looked pink to me when I played over my composit TV, and I'm pretty sure it was meant to be brown, but taken TVs picture quality in mind, and the fact that over composit (which all Japanese and European TVs were using) pixels and colors started to mesh. We've seen such tricks all the time, even much later. Metroid in the GBA for example used more intense solors in the programming because they knew the screen would desaturate the image to what they wanted it to look like. Later with better screens and emulators though, the colors are way too strong and not how it was intended to look like
It would be cool if you could be able to dye your hair in BotW 2, like you could dye your clothes in the first one. The contrasting sword, shield and hair is an interesting idea and one that I hadn't heard of before. It would have been cool if you could have found some footage of Link to the Past running on a CRT, but I understand how much of a challenge it would be to film it in the first place. I really wish there was a proper way to emulate the effects of a CRT on sprites for modern screens, Castlevania in particular had amazing sprite work that looked completely different on a CRT, much darker and with an effect that implied more detail than the sprite actually contained. Nice video, keen to see what your channel is all about.
would have been really effective to illustrate your point to show how link would look like with brown hair in game (not zoomed in) and on a crt monitor. that would show how the sprite blends with the background and would have made your point clear even without the narration
Very early in development the game was going to at least partly take place in a futuristic setting, my theory is the pink hair is a hold over from that time in development.
Plottwist: Someone at Nintendo was colorblind and complained about the wierd hair, so they made it pink to troll him and that person said: "oh, it looks fine". As the release came close, they were in such a hurry, it was no time to "unpink" the sprite and just kept it that way.
My guess is it was for contrast on black and white TVs. It wasn’t uncommon, as I was growing up in the 80s and early 90s, for kids to have an old black and white TV in their room for their game consoles. The new TV was for the family and not every parent let their children use it for video games. This was right around the time when color televisions were getting cheaper and families were buying more of them for their homes.
""Cheaper"" Looking up catalogue prices would tell you otherwise. A 9 inch color monitor sold for $290usd which, adjusted for inflation, costs $634usd today.
@@ericbarlow6772 A called it a monitor, I don't care. The monitor is the viewing screen. A television monitor has ports that allow it to accept a television signal. Television isn't the monitor. Television is what you see through the monitor. Basically, calling the thing that you watch television on the television is the same as calling any video game a "nintendo". It's wrong.
@@Tanookicatoon Back in the crt days a TV could be anything from a cheap display to av very expensive one, but an crt monitor on the other hand was always higher quality, example Sony pvm (pvm as in professional video monitor)
@@Tanookicatoon Monitors and TV sets were extremely different before recent times. I had monitors for my computer back in the 80s that offered a far higher display quality for the computer than the TV could do. Especially if the TV lacked a SCART socket. And yeah some parents didn't like kids plugging consoles into the TV. My parents thought it would make the TV explode.
This is just spitballing, but bright auburn hair (a reddish brown) is occasionally given hot pink highlights in artwork because it creates a better contrast between shadow and lighting. The same principle could be applied in a game for pure aesthetic reasons. While brown might be canon, bright pink can be used as a contrast.
I think I have the right answer here: I remember thinking why was it pink but quickly forgot and always remembered it as brown. The negative of green is pink and I think with the color blending and staring at so much green as it being the main color you see it gives the illusion of a lighter brown. I actually didn’t notice the pink until I went to the dark world I thought they had changed it there. So I think they were aware of this effect I forget what it is called and knew the brain would receive the color pink as a different shade of brown. And that’s how I remembered it when I first had played. Hell I remember replaying it and forgetting it turned pink in the dark world and didn’t notice it was pink again until I went to the dark world again and was like oh yeah it changes but it didn’t my brain just read it as a different color. I think I have the correct answer what do you guys think?
It's also much less noticeable on older TVs. It was a single line (sometimes a pixel more here and there) of pink pixels surrounded by green and skin tone. In the end it blends to a sort of brownish hinging on reds!
"Cuál misterio de los videojuegos te intriga?" Otros: minas abandonadas de Minecraft, espectros de Mario Galaxy, tails de peluche de Sonic R Este tipo: *PINK HAIRED LINK*
Computers looked blurry on TV sets until S-Video came out. By the time it started to become common on TV sets being paired with supporting devices, it wasn't long before component video replaced it. Shortly thereafter, HDMI took over. It's all we ever knew, so we didn't think much of it. Most people during the early 90s only had TVs with RF inputs, and it was hard to get a perfectly clean picture on them. There was likely some added smearing on top of the problems with composite video. When composite video became more available in the mid-90s, it was a large improvement over an RF input, but computers still looked blurry. It could be that the pink hair wasn't all that noticeable on TV sets due to the blurring, so I could easily see that it just looked better on the CRTs of the time. In fact, that's why a lot of people like playing old video games on old TV sets. I know gamers prefer studio monitors, but if you want the real experience, you'd want just a general color TV set. Nothing more than composite video. Good luck finding them, though. As for most of us old times, we kind of don't want to go back to playing on old TV sets. As I said, it was all we had and all we knew. The clarity that modern screens have is just no comparison, and the novelty would quickly wear off. You might want to see an old CRT TV in person before you decide you want your own CRT because you may find it the image to be too soft and the color washed out for your liking.
I feel like the best explanation is the shared palette one. Not for technical reason but as a design choice. The bunny sprite is dominantly pink, but it would feel less natural for the color to be newly introduced. Instead having some pink in the original sprite foreshadows the second form so that we feel that we're controlling the same character. It was quite important back then because a lot of kids were playing these games before having learn to read, and wouldnt understand the story if it wasnt for evocative design choices.
Love this video. The CRT theory is great. I would argue it doesn’t have to be a mistake OR technical limitation. Sometimes, things are just inconsistent. This sticks out because Nintendo usually keeps things consistent, but nobody is perfect, that’s life.
>"It'd be like if they put blonde hair on Mario in Super Mario World." Well, SMW had orange-arms Yoshi and green-hands Bowser, so that isn't actually that far out of the question....
The bunny theory also doesn't make sense because Link's hair color isn't even used on the bunny. Link's hair is more of a purple than a pink, despite the fan art. The bunny sprite though is straight up pink and doesn't reuse the purple of Link's hair anywhere on it, hence why changing Link's hair color doesn't break the bunny's look. While I'm not sure if your theory is the real reason for the pink hair, it IS the strongest argument I've ever seen for it. Most arguments tend to be easily disproved but this one... I could see Nintendo going a little overboard for the sake of visibility like this. They do that kind of wacky stuff all the time even to this day.
@@rubberwoody Yup! I've never liked the GBA SP. Even as a kid it was uncomfortable to hold, the L and R buttons were near unusable, and the backlight wasn't helpful because as you said, the games weren't designed to played with a backlight. You could see the image just fine, RUclipsrs just got spoiled by backlights on everything these days and don't like how the screen doesn't show up neatly when pointing their cameras at it, so they're all like "omg how did anyone ever play with this thing you can't see ANYTHING"
the color you’re thinking of is Magenta, not purple. the vid is also wrong about how Link’s hair is supposed to Light Brown- it’s not, it’s Dirty Blond, which is a darker form of Blonde hair, not a lighter form of Brown. you all either need to learn your colors... or get yours eyes checked for color blindness cuz it seems some of you are having some. difficulties telling closer shades of color apart.
Fun fact is that I don't recall the pink haired when I played it in an old TV back on 97s-ish. I just noticed it when I played on PC and I thought that was a ROM bug
1:59 I want to point out tho, Yoshi has orange arms in the in-game sprites, and green arms everywhere else. People know of this right? I always felt like Yoshi's orange arms and Link's pink hair had some sort of connection, like they had the same reason that you brought up at the end of the video, to just make the sprite stand out more against different backgrounds and make different aspects of the in-game character sprite stand out. Great video ☺️
@@adlaistevenson2623 Well, they matched the ones from SMB3 quite well, both games had odd Koopalings. They got their definitive colours in Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, except for Iggy who only got his green hair in Super Mario Bros Wii
@@stratonikisporcia8630 Only Larry and Wendy really had matching colors between SMB3 and SMW, but everyone else looked completely different, color-wise. And the ones from SMB3 were at least SOMEWHAT accurate (taking sprite limitations into account).
@@adlaistevenson2623 Iggy also has the same colours. Only Morton, Lemmy, Ludwig and Roy had different colours. Lemmy and Morton are very different, Roy is blue instead of pink, so not a huge difference, and Ludwig is yellow instead of blue. However, both Ludwigs had white hair instead of blue hair...
I always thought he just had some weird pinkish headband thing. It's true, on a cathodic tube screen, it's all blurry enough that you can't really tell. Besides, worse mistakes have been made, like when they accidentally switched Butterfree and Morphon's sprites in the original Pokémon games.
i really dont think well ever get it. they did not do it in a link between worlds, not even the lorule version of link has pink hair. thats already two opportunities missed. AND theres and old man thats implied to be alttp link. his beard is white of course but they couldve easily made it pink as a reference or let him wear at least some pink. since they had lots of opportunities and didnt take them i doubt theyll bring it back.
I've played so much Link to the Past, but I've *never* played it on anything but a CRT. It's always looked brownish thanks to color clash. It still looks brownish on my big screen CRT.
I haven't started the video, but I'm going to put out there that they made LttP in consideration of CRT TV's natural blending. While it looks out of place on an HD TV with crisp pixels in 1080p or 4K, the effect when playing on the family television sitting far away on the living room couch was that the hair was differentiated from the hat and skin, while not really looking pink. Bonus mystery: that strange 8-pixel line of garbage you see to the right of most NES sidescrollers as you walk forward was completely hidden by those same old TV's pysical black borders
It's definitely gotta be the contrast and trackability thing. Changing his starting tunic to blue probably would have worked too, but the green was already iconic by that point. I love pink link, but I don't think we'll ever get that again in a main series game. Link's hair is too core to his design at this point, and changing it up would confuse people. Would love to see a smash skin of LttP Link, or a DLC outfit in Tears of the Kingdom for LttP Link's clothes with pink hair included. They could do that easily, as they did in BotW - They changed link's hair color with the Twilight Princess Link and Dark Link outfits
I always figured it was a palette issue and hacks like Parallel Worlds simply found a workaround for it, but your theory about the visibility makes a *lot* of sense. I'd never considered that.
My TV growing up was a hand me down from 1978 and I was still using it in 2002. Text in Mario 64 was totally unreadable. I always loved the pink hair anyway, now I know it probably helped me even play LttP
Tbh, Link isn't exactly the only one who has inaccurate colors in ALTTP according to the official arts, there's Agahnim with green clothes and regular skin color and Zelda with brown hair and purple/white dress I wonder what's up with them :v
I didn't even watch the video but it's obvious why they did this. If you mess around with the sprites in a sprite editor, try changing the color to blonde. You will see that it just doesn't look right, the blonde-gold color does not stand out well against Link's white people skin color.
Color issues were kind of common during the NES and Super NES Eras. In Tecmo Super Bowl on NES, the red-colored New England Patriots uniforms were pink in the game. Or maybe the developers were just being silly.
For years, I only played LTTP on my friend's SNES, it was his copy so I was the navigator. The whole time we couldn't get over his pink hair, it was too cool.. Now years later, and with my own copy, I personally feel that Nintendo unintentionally made me a better person by teaching me to enjoy somebody for who they are
Exactly. On the old CRTs it blended and looked like a pinkish brown. Only once emulation started happening in the late 90s did people notice “oh look it’s pink!” And it became a meme. But in the old days it wasn’t obviously pink.
Nintendo actually made a joke about the Pink haired link in Tri-Force Heroes. Theres a person outside of the castle who has the same get-up as LTTP Link. Including the pink hair. Unfortunately he can't get in the castle because he doesn't have pointy ears!
Yeahh, since I really like Tri Force Heroes, I was hoping that he would mention that when he talked about potential future easter eggs related to pink haired Link.
It is a very good video anyway.
Nintendo really let a chum like LINK in and kept on refusing FAUX HERO! The clear protagonist of the story.
Man's still got the full hero drip tho
They made a joke about everything in triforce heroes
@Yoh What the heck is a drip, boyo? Sounds like he should see a doctor, just sayin’. 😏
can you imagine someone interviewing Miyamoto some day, asking why Link in alttp has pink hair and Miyamoto just goes "he has WHAT?!?"
It kinda happened. For Super Mario Maker someone did an interview with an og nintendo director or supervisor, and they basically said that Bowser wasn't supposed to have the design it has in Super Mario World. And he didn't noticed until the creation of SMM.
Can't find the original interview, so i can't tell if I'm being wrong, so sorry if it's the case.
In all these years I always thought the pink was part of his hat.
Same.
Same🤣
Igual yo xD
XD same
Same!
I'm also confident it's for contrast, yellow would blend with the cap's brim and brown is already use for skin shadows. So the pink was different enough for us to know it's the hair.
A lot of games in that time also has this kind of change between artwork and ingame sprite, it's purely for better readability.
Looking back it's amazing all the limitations they had to work around to give us something visually appealing. It's easy to say ''oh they should have made the background darker'' or something when we have no clue the hues available due to the color output of crts. I'm always amazed how far tvs have come in their ability to display colors. I loved doing art on them over computer monitors. The big size was also a great help for my blind self XD
I like how the pink bunny looked ethereal, and it felt like a hint to his cute fluffy other self. That's how I reasoned the pink hair difference, but I don't remember having access to the game manual. I believe we rented this game a few times and rented games rarely included manuals then. But I remember seeing the artwork the more I explored online. Never really crossed my mind until this video XD
This. Also, no-one back in the day mentioned his hair being pink. Everyone read the color as light brown because of the interaction with the other colors surrounding it.
Also blue, pink and yellow are what we call a "color harmony". These colors look pleasing to the eye - you might've seen websites, apps or posters where the main colors are pink, blue and yellow.
@@ShinoSarna yeah, think it s called a triadic color scheme (if autocorrect doesn't bug it up) same effect with purple, green and orange.
I read link (now at least) as red, blue, green. The color of lighted monitors, colors representing the triforce...probably just another zonal swirl, but it might explain why pink and not any other color. They seem to like to play off the contemplative thoughts of teammates as ''hur dur we tried it and worked!''
It'd be nice if they shared, but I'll figure out that trick on my own if I have to. Goofballs.
So kinda like how in FF6 the sprites don't match the artwork?
I remember hearing the main reason Mega Man was green in Captain N is because the artist who was researching the games had an old TV and he honestly thought the blue bomber was green because of how the TV made the games looked
I did wonder about the green MegaMan in Captain N, but yeah old tvs can mess up color like that so it makes sense.
does the same apply to that weird king hippo color scheme? i always just kind of assumed these people never even played the games, cause how do you even get something so simple wrong like that
@@coralimes3074 I honesty don't know. I just remember an interview out there of an artist who did a very early version of Captain N and he only played Megaman for one night.
@@coralimes3074 captain n was made on sone heavy restrictions, Nintendo wasn't willing to send them official artwork or any real guidelines to character designs ,so half the character had to be made via box art only or just guess work , such as mother brain and king hippo, hell the reason eggplant mage was there was because they weren't aware about medusa , another thing was they wanted include alucard from the at the time new castlevaina games...but because the only reference they had was darculas son and draculas apparence in the box art, his design looks nothing like it supposed to , Essentially captain n was a consequence of Nintendo not caring, why would they ? They already had a success mario and zelda show in the west anyways
@@maverickdarkrath4780 Interesting, makes sense. Ya know, despite all of this, it's funny the show ended up being pretty fantastic in a quarky alternative dimension way.
Regardless of actual canonicity, I absolutely love the idea of this little man running around in a world devoid of hair dye inexplicably having pink hair, and nobody questioning it.
It's fantasy. Maybe hyleans can just have wacky hair colors from birth? Who knows.
@@lemonov3031 there's many hylians in future games with blue and green and bright red hair, so this is most definitely correct
That's how you know who's the main character
Saiki kusou moment
If they have dye for clothing, then they can use the same dye for hair.
Growing up playing ALttP on a crappy CRT, I never noticed Link's hair was pink. The combination of low graphic quality and surrounding colors, it looked light brown to me (light brown, not tunic brown). When I was informed his hair was pink, I was shocked. Sure enough, it was all this time, so a combination of the latter theory presented here as well as pink bunny (which always looked pink even on crappy CRTs) made the most sense to me.
Same here. I played a lot on old TVs and never noticed the pink haired. It was just a thing for me when I started playing on PC, but I thought it was a bug in the ROM
I love pink haired link. Helps distinguish him from the other links. It always makes me happy to see people draw him with it.
I 100% agree, it makes ALttP stand out from other Zelda games as well. If they remake that game, I hope Link keeps the pink hair.
I love how you mentioned the existence of the way CRTs worked, because the first thing I noticed about those screen shots, was that they were actual real "shots of the screen", and that the hair actually looked just a tiny bit brown. What's funny is, I definitely remember the hair still looking a little pink on CRTs back in the day.
I almost want to say that it might have to be something with the way Japanese CRTs work over American ones, because something I remember very vividly was getting to edit the Mario World sprites in Mario Paint, and getting get a VERY close look at them with the stamp editor. You look at those, and discover that a lot of Mario's sprites actually have purple in them!
Mario World was a launch title, and A Link to the Past was released only a year later. Considering advancements between these two games isn't too far off, I imagine the skills they used for creating the sprites with whatever limitations they had used a similar process.
I once noticed that Guile from Street Fighter 2 has " bright skin color" on his hair.
pink haired link: ^STEPS INTO THE DUBGEON^ i need to speak to your manager! ^gets warped to the boss room with the dungeon item.
I don't believe the Mario World sprites were actually purple, because of the limited painting palette used.
@@nowonmetube A lot of 16 bit games do this. Check out Super Mario Kart.
@@nowonmetube That's because the color palette is limited, so they had to use skin color for highlights in blonde hair a lot. Even Street Fighter Zero/Alpha series from PS1 times had skin color for blonde.
never knew it was pink, it always appeared to be like peach 🍑 colored on my CRT TV. it wasn't until i played a ROM on my computer when i could see the sprite, pixels, and the colors crystal clear.
at that moment i realized the hair always looked light tan or 🍑 peach-colored on my CRT because it was always actually pink. that's a neat color hack on Nintendo's part.
I think that the simple reason why is that if his hair was light brown like most of the art of link, then it would worsen the sprite’s readability. This goes not just on small crt tvs, but in general. If his hair was light brown it would blend in too well with his skin or his hat’s rim. Pink can be used in a stylized way to represent blonde in a similar way that yellow is. The brown hair looks good in an illustration, but with pixel art it gets lost easily. Color is so much more important. You need to make things stand out or they will get lost in the visual clutter.
Also the SNES only could have so many different colors of pixels, 256 not counting black and white, and many of those had to be one of three or four slightly lighter or darker versions of the same base color for use in the shading effects that made the SNES stand out. Meaning in actuality the SNES had probably around 64 ACTUAL individual colors to work with for EVERYTHING, and so the only pixels they had even CLOSE to Link's artwork hair color were already in use for, say, the dirt, like you said.
So they had to do something else to still put Link's hair in but also not make it blend and vanish any time he was over, say, dirt, just like you said. The solution they chose was to use bright pink, a color I don't think they used anywhere else but on certain sprite models, namely Link and Bunny Link. If there were others I can't remember.
Bingo!
Thanks for reiterating the video and contributing nothing?
@@Growmetheus What I contributed, was the TLDR version
i've played the Randomizer with a brown haired link sprite and he never blended in as much as you're making it sound like.
For his hair color in the old mangas, I imagine they colored it pink/purple/magenta to complement his tunic and for the same reason tons of anime have very colorful hair; to make the character look unique. It's really interesting to think that the sprite was changed to allow playability. I've had a large CRT ever since I was a kid, so I never imagined that Link blending into the background would have been such an issue. If Nintendo never makes an official statement, I think you've done a good job of closing the books on the mystery.
I honestly never realized that he had pink hair in this game, I always thought that the pink was a part of his hat but I played this on gba and was looking at a smaller sprite than if I was looking at it on a tv
It's most likely for the old CRTs of the time IMO. The CRT TV I first played LTTP on was in fact from the late 70s/early 80s and compared to newer CRTs of the time, the colors were not as vibrant and the image had pixels and most fine details blurring together. The pink hair on that type of screen really never stood out as pink hair. It really just looked close to light brown. I actually never noticed Link had pink hair in the game until I emulated it on a PC and that was when I discovered I missed out on a LOT of little details in the game.
Similar experience here when I got access to the internet I found out about pink haired link and actually dug my old SNES out to plug into a newer tv and went huh neat. it looked redish brown back then to me
@@Nathan-qp9uv I can totally see that. Depending on the TV, you got variations of how things were blurred together and if a TV was on it's last legs and the tint was way off and couldn't be fixed, it would make sonic look green. ;)
Same for me, never saw the pink hair until i played it on a modern TV
As a kid i just figured it was light brown. Didnt bother me in the slightest because it was common back in the nes/snes days to not have game graphics and colors match artwork
The fact that no one at nintendo has ever been asked about this actually boggles my mind.
I asked myself "why pink? Couldn't they made him blonde? That stands out just as well" until i remembered, his hair was never blonde until way later on the N64.
In hindsight blonde works better but pink is closer to his light brown/caramel hair in official artwork.
Actually ALttP Link's hair was always canonically blonde in the artwork. It was just a darker shade of blonde that is unfortunately commonly mistook for light brown called dirty blonde. Also, there's people who think that OoT Link's hair is orange. So really, going by the logic of light brunette Link on SNES and Redhead Link on N64 or even not, Link didn't officially and undeniably have "true blonde" hair until Wind Waker on GameCube. However, that only applied to the new Toon version of Link, while the semi-realistic Link still always "light brown" or dirty blonde hair. That said, Link never actually had "true blonde" hair realistically. Not canonically anyways. So by the logic of most people, Link was still always either interpreted by many as being a brunette or redhead who only has blonde hair whenever he's portrayed in Toon Link form. Even though canonically, he's supposed be a dirty blonde.
It makes more sense for him to be a dirty blonde because it contrasts better with how he's always portrayed as a peasant/traveler who always ventures around the world through the wildness, visiting towns and stuff, while Princess Zelda has lighter blonde hair as she is a more civilized regal person of authority and order. Link is a wild adventurer while Zelda is a regal princess. Hence the reason for Link's hair always being darker than Zelda's. Dirty blonde goes well with someone who isn't afraid to get their hands dirty while light blonde or true blonde fits better for someone is very important and pure. However, the only exceptions to this logic are Zelda I, Zelda II, Twilight Princess, BotW, and the new upcoming Tears of the Kingdom. Zelda in the first two games and TP is a brunette, while BotW/TotK Zelda has the same blonde hair as Link does in BotW/TotK but a slightly/barely a bit lighter. Other than that, Link and Zelda both are supposed to be canonically blonde.
There was actually a pink-haired female Link in a Zelda 1 guide in the Japanese Shonen Captain magazine from 1986, it was the first time that a pink-haired Link and a female Link were seen
Also, in the latest Nintendo leak, there were a few official ALTTP concept arts of a pink-haired chibi Link made out of clay and many beta sprites where Link was already pink-haired, so fans think the plan was always for him to have pink hair in the game
It's really strange that he doesn't on the official promotional artworks, maybe the market team thought it would be a bad idea, but the developers didn't want to make the change to the game itself
Wow! Incredible. Female Link is kinda cute tbh.
The chibis also could have just been concepts for the sprite with the change already made cause they knew the brown hair would be a problem going in. This devs probably learned from a few of the games that had been released at launch in the console's lifespan and adjusted appropriately since the game was going to use a lot of greens and browns, Link's main color scheme. It'd make sense that they'd want it on the concept art so the sprite artists would know and design it accordingly.
Unless I'm mistaken, I read somewhere many years ago that outside of video games pink hair is supposed to indicate strawberry blond in anime. I'm not sure why they do that in Japan, but it might be something to do with a limited colour pallet at the time and/or that strawberry blond looks too similar to red hair or something like that.
Yeah I remember it being a thing though I can't give any examples off the top of my head lol.
It's probably similar to how old comic books used blues to represent black hair. In this case though they could print it black, it's just that black ink was expensive at the time.
Interesting video, well done! I think your conclusion makes a lot of sense. I grew up playing A Link to the Past on the Gameboy Advanced, and on that tiny little screen kid me just assumed he had a pink brim on his hat and I never gave it anymore thought until I saw this video XD
this mf said Advanced
@@cashnelson2306 That's what I always called it since I was a kid, guess I never knew it was wrong until now XD
I put a ton of hours into A Link to the Past back in the day and I never realized it was actually pink until modern era discussions of it started growing. Many many games back then had small tricks to deal with limitations, so I think I already had a strong habit of "interpreting" things. My mind only "knew" he had a normal hair color.
I've always thought that it'd be badass if the 2nd Quest/Master Mode difficulties let Link have his pink hair
There's actually photos of a clay figure from multiple sides that was used as a reference to draw the sprites. It had the exact colors used in-game.
i.imgur.com/jaa7Cao.png
Can you show me a picture of the clay figure?
Just wanted to say that I got this in my recommended and you have so much charisma in your script reading
It does make logical sense, same reason Mario was given a hat.
The pink looked like a light brown on my CRT, and it matched the English manual. The blue on the shield also looked like another shade of gray, like shiny and dull gray tones of the shield.
Also the pink hair on those magazines was clearly sun damage, as on two of them his brown boots were also pink, and the red/brown moblins show as bright pink as well.
I figured it was a visual thing, and brown or blonde might have blended with the skin tone where there’s more going on with Link’s sprite, and pink stood out with the green. Given how there are areas of the overworld are green, the related complimentary color is a good choice to make the character stand out (kinda like Spyro being purple because his initial green version would have blended into the grass), despite his official art.
Nobody here ever played it on SNES on a CRT over an RF cable or composite? His hair doesn't look pink. It's an optical blending thing (mixing/blending of colors by proximity, via your eye + distortion of the CRT). You needed to have an insane TV AND video hookup back when the game was released to even notice the pink. It was a trick to make his hair distinct from his skin and his hat. It doesn't look pink… but it's hard to explain unless you've really seen it.
I always wondered about that as well. I had considered that it was part of his hat... but his sideburns were also pink. I assumed it was somehow a color limitation and just accepted it. However, I think that you are probably right about the tracking. You are also probably right in that we will only see it again in a cameo or something like that.
If Animal Crossing ever brings back the Nintendo villagers that you get from amiibos, there should really be pink bunny Link among them.
You're hired
Knowing how much Japanese folks seem to love puns, it could even be as simple as it started as "Link" sounding like "Pink", Linku/Pinku. Both are borrowed words, so they'd be extra funny, enough to put it on the sprite as a gag and end up liking it for how much it stood out.
I think maybe Link was just going thru a rebellious teen phase and dyed his hair LOL
lol, also a very real possibility
Great video! I could maybe see Nintendo adding a shop to dye Link's hair in a village or something for customization. Kinda like how you can dye certain tunics in BotW.
There's also the character in Triforce Heroes at the Castle entrance, but I believe that was mostly a coincidence on the developers part, and not a straight reference to ALTTP.
I like that in addition to pink hair Link, we also got a good look at pink hare Link.
Not just does it aid in tracking the character on the background but it also aids in making it easier to see the distinction between Link's hair and skin, which was also a light brown color
I think it also may have been pink for the benefit of being able to tell the exact direction Link is facing. Notice how distinct it makes the direction he's facing. But do agree it likely mainly is due to CRTs having indistinct pixels. Not just that, but CRTs also were able to combine near pixels to make new colors the system wasn't actually able to produce on its own. It allowed for smoother color gradients. The more chunky pixel look we see on games was far less pronounced on CRTs because of their indistinct pixel layout.
Considering there is a Dye Shop in BOTW to change your clothes colors, Its entirely reasonable to dye your hair. I was actually a little disappointed you couldn't.
Pink haired Link! Next thing you know they'll be making Yoshi's with orange arms!
Yet another great SNES era debate lol
@@Ogles Also green armed Bowser. Yoshi and Bowser swapped arms in that game.
I also wanna point out that his uncle in the game had a kind of vibrant looking blue hair, and I’m sure his parents had some cool hair colors too, there’s a possible theory for a story or lore reason for the hair tucked in there I’m sure lol
Well, we know that ALttP Link descends from the knights of Hyrule, so maybe that's a tradition among them?
Actually we did get to see Pink Hair Link in a later game, well... sorta. I guess is technically more of an easter egg but in TriForce Heroes, the kid that complains about not being allowed in because of having round ears looks a lot like A Link to the Past Link and even has very similar hair color and clothing.
I think you may have the right of it. Pink hair stands out against darker backgrounds, and particularly against green; magenta and green are complimentary colors. By a similar token, in the original Castlevania game, Simon Belmont's sprite is medium oranges and browns, colors that offset well against the many dark blues in the game. Once again, yellow and blue are complimentary colors.
I think you're slot on, the technical need was tonmake Link's sprite pop. It was common practice for in-game art to not match the idealized external material art.
But I think the specific colors might also have to do with Japanese culture. Because if you have to compromise your physical vision of the character, might as well make it symbolic, and the zelda franchise has always had deep multicultural influences - it is par for their game. Traditionally in Japan, blue is the common people's color, particularly their clothes, which Link wears on his gear. A hero from the people to the people. And a hero who is not one by birthright, but by what is in his head, the purple/violet/pink that is a color associated with the noble (at least in later romanticized ideation) samurai warrior. His mind makes him a warrior hero (and by extension of his silent protag self, you), not the conditions of his birth. It could as well be also a reference to The Flower of Edo (tl;dr; the main male actor and character of this famous cultural touch stone work is depicted in original artwork of the time witha distinctive purple hairband which link's sprite is a wee bit reminiscent of).
I can honestly say it wasn't something that i noticed before this. I grew up playing a link to the past. Thinking about it now actually hair color is something that just doesn't stick out to me as a detail about the character to remember at all. Trying to remember the hair color of a lot of my favorite video game characters just comes up blank.
Yeah, I think you're reasoning combined with the existence of the pink hair in those earlier comics seems pretty legit.
Thanks!
To me it never looked pink to me when I played over my composit TV, and I'm pretty sure it was meant to be brown, but taken TVs picture quality in mind, and the fact that over composit (which all Japanese and European TVs were using) pixels and colors started to mesh.
We've seen such tricks all the time, even much later. Metroid in the GBA for example used more intense solors in the programming because they knew the screen would desaturate the image to what they wanted it to look like. Later with better screens and emulators though, the colors are way too strong and not how it was intended to look like
It would be cool if you could be able to dye your hair in BotW 2, like you could dye your clothes in the first one.
The contrasting sword, shield and hair is an interesting idea and one that I hadn't heard of before. It would have been cool if you could have found some footage of Link to the Past running on a CRT, but I understand how much of a challenge it would be to film it in the first place.
I really wish there was a proper way to emulate the effects of a CRT on sprites for modern screens, Castlevania in particular had amazing sprite work that looked completely different on a CRT, much darker and with an effect that implied more detail than the sprite actually contained.
Nice video, keen to see what your channel is all about.
So wait, this DOESN’T actually solve the mystery???
I was hoping this video would've had some information related to the LTTP female Link design that was used in a magazine promo.
would have been really effective to illustrate your point to show how link would look like with brown hair in game (not zoomed in) and on a crt monitor. that would show how the sprite blends with the background and would have made your point clear even without the narration
Very early in development the game was going to at least partly take place in a futuristic setting, my theory is the pink hair is a hold over from that time in development.
Plottwist: Someone at Nintendo was colorblind and complained about the wierd hair, so they made it pink to troll him and that person said: "oh, it looks fine".
As the release came close, they were in such a hurry, it was no time to "unpink" the sprite and just kept it that way.
that's not how colour blindness works
@@dmign Which of the 3 types of color blindness.
@@Sypaka 7 types, actually
I’m glad they changed it but I do think it adds for a great part of the games franchise
My guess is it was for contrast on black and white TVs. It wasn’t uncommon, as I was growing up in the 80s and early 90s, for kids to have an old black and white TV in their room for their game consoles. The new TV was for the family and not every parent let their children use it for video games. This was right around the time when color televisions were getting cheaper and families were buying more of them for their homes.
""Cheaper"" Looking up catalogue prices would tell you otherwise. A 9 inch color monitor sold for $290usd which, adjusted for inflation, costs $634usd today.
@@Tanookicatoon color monitor and color television are different things.
@@ericbarlow6772 A called it a monitor, I don't care.
The monitor is the viewing screen.
A television monitor has ports that allow it to accept a television signal.
Television isn't the monitor. Television is what you see through the monitor.
Basically, calling the thing that you watch television on the television is the same as calling any video game a "nintendo". It's wrong.
@@Tanookicatoon
Back in the crt days a TV could be anything from a cheap display to av very expensive one, but an crt monitor on the other hand was always higher quality, example Sony pvm
(pvm as in professional video monitor)
@@Tanookicatoon Monitors and TV sets were extremely different before recent times. I had monitors for my computer back in the 80s that offered a far higher display quality for the computer than the TV could do. Especially if the TV lacked a SCART socket.
And yeah some parents didn't like kids plugging consoles into the TV. My parents thought it would make the TV explode.
Before I watch the video, I’m going to take a guess: They didn’t want him to be “too cool” (like for the reason they gave him tights in OOT)
This is just spitballing, but bright auburn hair (a reddish brown) is occasionally given hot pink highlights in artwork because it creates a better contrast between shadow and lighting. The same principle could be applied in a game for pure aesthetic reasons. While brown might be canon, bright pink can be used as a contrast.
I think I have the right answer here:
I remember thinking why was it pink but quickly forgot and always remembered it as brown. The negative of green is pink and I think with the color blending and staring at so much green as it being the main color you see it gives the illusion of a lighter brown. I actually didn’t notice the pink until I went to the dark world I thought they had changed it there. So I think they were aware of this effect I forget what it is called and knew the brain would receive the color pink as a different shade of brown. And that’s how I remembered it when I first had played. Hell I remember replaying it and forgetting it turned pink in the dark world and didn’t notice it was pink again until I went to the dark world again and was like oh yeah it changes but it didn’t my brain just read it as a different color.
I think I have the correct answer what do you guys think?
Pink haired Link? More like... Pink.
Plink
It's also much less noticeable on older TVs. It was a single line (sometimes a pixel more here and there) of pink pixels surrounded by green and skin tone. In the end it blends to a sort of brownish hinging on reds!
this seriously made me so confused of why links hair was pink every since i was a little kid. thank you for covering it.
I think i was about 11 when i got the game and until recently just assumed it was a band on his cap.
ive always heard it was due to the hatband on the blue mail
"Cuál misterio de los videojuegos te intriga?"
Otros: minas abandonadas de Minecraft, espectros de Mario Galaxy, tails de peluche de Sonic R
Este tipo: *PINK HAIRED LINK*
Computers looked blurry on TV sets until S-Video came out. By the time it started to become common on TV sets being paired with supporting devices, it wasn't long before component video replaced it. Shortly thereafter, HDMI took over. It's all we ever knew, so we didn't think much of it. Most people during the early 90s only had TVs with RF inputs, and it was hard to get a perfectly clean picture on them. There was likely some added smearing on top of the problems with composite video. When composite video became more available in the mid-90s, it was a large improvement over an RF input, but computers still looked blurry. It could be that the pink hair wasn't all that noticeable on TV sets due to the blurring, so I could easily see that it just looked better on the CRTs of the time. In fact, that's why a lot of people like playing old video games on old TV sets. I know gamers prefer studio monitors, but if you want the real experience, you'd want just a general color TV set. Nothing more than composite video. Good luck finding them, though. As for most of us old times, we kind of don't want to go back to playing on old TV sets. As I said, it was all we had and all we knew. The clarity that modern screens have is just no comparison, and the novelty would quickly wear off. You might want to see an old CRT TV in person before you decide you want your own CRT because you may find it the image to be too soft and the color washed out for your liking.
actually colors are really vibrant on a crt, and if you find the imagine too soft you can always use component or RGB outputs
I was kind of bummed when the A Link between worlds Link didn't have pink hair.
Agree 100%
I feel like the best explanation is the shared palette one. Not for technical reason but as a design choice. The bunny sprite is dominantly pink, but it would feel less natural for the color to be newly introduced. Instead having some pink in the original sprite foreshadows the second form so that we feel that we're controlling the same character. It was quite important back then because a lot of kids were playing these games before having learn to read, and wouldnt understand the story if it wasnt for evocative design choices.
Love this video. The CRT theory is great. I would argue it doesn’t have to be a mistake OR technical limitation. Sometimes, things are just inconsistent. This sticks out because Nintendo usually keeps things consistent, but nobody is perfect, that’s life.
I heard that originally they thought they were making a Kirby game, and the devs didn't want to admit their mistake.
I’m loving that theory. Would make sense. On a side note, those Zelda comics look cool 😮. Have a tip top weekend.
They do look cool, right? I was thinking of looking into them after seeing this video XD
@@yukitakahashi5739 definitely Yuki! I had no idea they even existed. Always things to learn from the fab Ogles channel 👍👍👍. 😊🕹️
>"It'd be like if they put blonde hair on Mario in Super Mario World."
Well, SMW had orange-arms Yoshi and green-hands Bowser, so that isn't actually that far out of the question....
The bunny theory also doesn't make sense because Link's hair color isn't even used on the bunny. Link's hair is more of a purple than a pink, despite the fan art. The bunny sprite though is straight up pink and doesn't reuse the purple of Link's hair anywhere on it, hence why changing Link's hair color doesn't break the bunny's look. While I'm not sure if your theory is the real reason for the pink hair, it IS the strongest argument I've ever seen for it. Most arguments tend to be easily disproved but this one... I could see Nintendo going a little overboard for the sake of visibility like this. They do that kind of wacky stuff all the time even to this day.
yeah they did that a lot on the early GBA games. No backlight plus detailed sprites meant colors had to be washed out to give contrast
@@rubberwoody Yup! I've never liked the GBA SP. Even as a kid it was uncomfortable to hold, the L and R buttons were near unusable, and the backlight wasn't helpful because as you said, the games weren't designed to played with a backlight. You could see the image just fine, RUclipsrs just got spoiled by backlights on everything these days and don't like how the screen doesn't show up neatly when pointing their cameras at it, so they're all like "omg how did anyone ever play with this thing you can't see ANYTHING"
Even if Link and Bunny used the same hue of pink, Bunny has several shades of pink that Link's palette would have to account for.
the color you’re thinking of is Magenta, not purple. the vid is also wrong about how Link’s hair is supposed to Light Brown- it’s not, it’s Dirty Blond, which is a darker form of Blonde hair, not a lighter form of Brown.
you all either need to learn your colors... or get yours eyes checked for color blindness cuz it seems some of you are having some. difficulties telling closer shades of color apart.
Fun fact is that I don't recall the pink haired when I played it in an old TV back on 97s-ish. I just noticed it when I played on PC and I thought that was a ROM bug
1:59 I want to point out tho, Yoshi has orange arms in the in-game sprites, and green arms everywhere else. People know of this right? I always felt like Yoshi's orange arms and Link's pink hair had some sort of connection, like they had the same reason that you brought up at the end of the video, to just make the sprite stand out more against different backgrounds and make different aspects of the in-game character sprite stand out. Great video ☺️
I think Yoshi's arms were fixed on the GBA remake, so probably unintentional
@@stratonikisporcia8630 Now for the next mystery... Why are the Koopalings colored so weirdly in Super Mario World?
@@adlaistevenson2623 Well, they matched the ones from SMB3 quite well, both games had odd Koopalings. They got their definitive colours in Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, except for Iggy who only got his green hair in Super Mario Bros Wii
@@stratonikisporcia8630 Only Larry and Wendy really had matching colors between SMB3 and SMW, but everyone else looked completely different, color-wise. And the ones from SMB3 were at least SOMEWHAT accurate (taking sprite limitations into account).
@@adlaistevenson2623 Iggy also has the same colours. Only Morton, Lemmy, Ludwig and Roy had different colours. Lemmy and Morton are very different, Roy is blue instead of pink, so not a huge difference, and Ludwig is yellow instead of blue. However, both Ludwigs had white hair instead of blue hair...
I'm now so old that lessons in what tvs were like when I was a kid are now required for new viewers 😭
I always thought he just had some weird pinkish headband thing. It's true, on a cathodic tube screen, it's all blurry enough that you can't really tell.
Besides, worse mistakes have been made, like when they accidentally switched Butterfree and Morphon's sprites in the original Pokémon games.
I played this as a kid on the Gameboy Advance I think and I honestly never really noticed the pink hair hehe
the legend of zelda is based on shigeru miyamoto's childhood so shigeru miyamoto must of had pink hair as a child
I didn't know Miyamoto once fought a big blue pork
I was going to say I played this on 20 inch CRT in my bedroom as a kid and never thought Link had pink hair.
I predict there will be a pink haired link outfit in Tears of the Kingdom....
......one can only hope.
i really dont think well ever get it. they did not do it in a link between worlds, not even the lorule version of link has pink hair. thats already two opportunities missed. AND theres and old man thats implied to be alttp link. his beard is white of course but they couldve easily made it pink as a reference or let him wear at least some pink.
since they had lots of opportunities and didnt take them i doubt theyll bring it back.
Sadly I'd say you're right...could have at least put a pink streak in the beard, lol.
I want pink haired Link back
His hat has yellow so I guess they did not wanted it, to be confused.
I’m a 70’s/80’s kid and had no idea his hair was pink till the first flatscreens came out and emulation became popular.
I've played so much Link to the Past, but I've *never* played it on anything but a CRT. It's always looked brownish thanks to color clash. It still looks brownish on my big screen CRT.
Glad to see that mystery solved. Oddly, I didn't think anything about his hair until you mentioned it.
I haven't started the video, but I'm going to put out there that they made LttP in consideration of CRT TV's natural blending. While it looks out of place on an HD TV with crisp pixels in 1080p or 4K, the effect when playing on the family television sitting far away on the living room couch was that the hair was differentiated from the hat and skin, while not really looking pink.
Bonus mystery: that strange 8-pixel line of garbage you see to the right of most NES sidescrollers as you walk forward was completely hidden by those same old TV's pysical black borders
It's definitely gotta be the contrast and trackability thing. Changing his starting tunic to blue probably would have worked too, but the green was already iconic by that point.
I love pink link, but I don't think we'll ever get that again in a main series game. Link's hair is too core to his design at this point, and changing it up would confuse people. Would love to see a smash skin of LttP Link, or a DLC outfit in Tears of the Kingdom for LttP Link's clothes with pink hair included. They could do that easily, as they did in BotW - They changed link's hair color with the Twilight Princess Link and Dark Link outfits
Well, a blue tunic is unlocked at some point in the game
I always figured it was a palette issue and hacks like Parallel Worlds simply found a workaround for it, but your theory about the visibility makes a *lot* of sense. I'd never considered that.
My TV growing up was a hand me down from 1978 and I was still using it in 2002. Text in Mario 64 was totally unreadable. I always loved the pink hair anyway, now I know it probably helped me even play LttP
Title: Mystery solved.
Content: I dunno, mate. What do you think?
Ya know I've never questioned why his hair was pink, I just accepted it to the point I was so confused when I read the title.
Tbh, Link isn't exactly the only one who has inaccurate colors in ALTTP according to the official arts, there's Agahnim with green clothes and regular skin color and Zelda with brown hair and purple/white dress
I wonder what's up with them :v
They probably reused artworks from Zelda 1 and 2
@@stratonikisporcia8630 i don't think that really makes sense as Agahnim isn't in Zelda 1 or 2
@@yagofazcoisaseuacho8035 The magician from Zelda II is quite similar
I didn't even watch the video but it's obvious why they did this. If you mess around with the sprites in a sprite editor, try changing the color to blonde. You will see that it just doesn't look right, the blonde-gold color does not stand out well against Link's white people skin color.
Color issues were kind of common during the NES and Super NES Eras. In Tecmo Super Bowl on NES, the red-colored New England Patriots uniforms were pink in the game. Or maybe the developers were just being silly.
For years, I only played LTTP on my friend's SNES, it was his copy so I was the navigator. The whole time we couldn't get over his pink hair, it was too cool..
Now years later, and with my own copy, I personally feel that Nintendo unintentionally made me a better person by teaching me to enjoy somebody for who they are
I never even noticed the pink hair, I dont know why but my mind corrected it to brown.
From terrier Zack, he never have hair ponk
Exactly. On the old CRTs it blended and looked like a pinkish brown. Only once emulation started happening in the late 90s did people notice “oh look it’s pink!” And it became a meme. But in the old days it wasn’t obviously pink.
It was always noticably pink even back then though. I remember discussing it with friends at school in the early 90s as to why Link had pink hair.
Mods to fix the pink hair exist
I bet that's why Links hair in OoT is that very bright yellow color rather than light brown
as a kid I thought it was a totally Rad 90's pink Visor on his elf hat.
In my old tv, I always thinked his hair was brown. In a emulator, I thinked the pink hair as a visual glitch lol