His name was Chris Houlihan, and he won a NP contest to get his name in the game. The only real point to the room was to be "whoa, secret room! congrats!"
It's not necessary to have that particular sword; it's quite easy to get there without it. So long as you get there within seconds of starting a saved game, you've got it. I also heard that with some error, people also ended up there if there was a problem loading the next screen.
Only thing I didn't like was getting brought to his uncle's house every time I left it, although it did cut time off a few journeys.
way to friggin look it up on wiki and act like u know.
Um, I actually didn't look it up. I've played the game pretty much all my life, so I would hope that I'd know/learn this stuff over the years...if I did look it up somewhere, it was a while ago.