Who was the real Master Higgins?

Master Higgins is not an invented character. He is a portrait of Toshiyuki Takahashi (born May 23, 1959, in Sapporo), a Hudson Soft employee who joined the company in August 1982 and rose to become its public face. In Japan he is Takahashi Meijin, Master Takahashi, and the Japanese title of Adventure Island carries his name outright: Takahashi Meijin no Boken Jima, Master Takahashi's Adventure Island. The Western localization simply renamed the man, Takahashi to Higgins, and kept everything else, down to the ball cap Takahashi really wore.

His fame rests on one number: sixteen shots per second. Takahashi could press a controller button sixteen times in a second, a skill demonstrated on Hudson's shooters Star Force and Star Soldier and turned into a national legend during the Hudson Caravan tours he hosted from 1985, standing on stage in front of crowds of children as the living proof of what practice could do. He has since said the filmed count was actually seventeen, rounded down to sixteen because it sounded better, more like a computer. Hudson sold a Shooting Watch gadget so children could measure themselves against him, and the feat echoed for decades, down to a button mashing mini game in Mario Party 4 modeled on it.

Adventure Island exists because of a resemblance. Takahashi's own account, given in interview: Hudson was adapting the arcade game Wonder Boy, the character being built already somewhat resembled him, and the company's vice president said that since Takahashi was a celebrity, it made no sense for the game not to be about him. So the spokesman became the hero, then an anime and manga star in his own right. He stayed at Hudson for nearly thirty years, leaving in May 2011, less than a year before the company itself was dissolved. There is no other major series in games whose hero is the publisher's own marketing executive, still alive, still introduced by the number sixteen.