Pink Haired Link - The Mystery Solved (A Link to the Past - Legend of Zelda)

In all these years I always thought the pink was part of his hat.

can you imagine someone interviewing Miyamoto some day, asking why Link in alttp has pink hair and Miyamoto just goes "he has WHAT?!?"

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

It does make logical sense, same reason Mario was given a hat.

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.