Earthbound Vs Nostalgia

EarthBound, or the Mother series, is a stalwart of the Nintendo roster despite it being relatively unknown outside of it’s core audience. A lot of people solely know the series through characters that appear in the Super Smash Bros franchise and, EarthBound isn’t available on Switch, Nintendo’s current system owned by millions of people. This is a great loss to old players looking to replay one of the instalments, and those who are yet to experience EarthBound, as it is one of the most beloved RPG games of all time and an intriguing slice of gaming history to boot.

My first experience with EarthBound, outside of Super Smash Bros, was on the virtual console release of the game for 3DS. EarthBound is a bashful, funny and heart-warming story set against late 20th century America. You start the game as a kid growing up in a small town, investigating a meteorite with your neighbour and your dog in the middle of the night. As the game progresses, you meet reams and reams of strange, talkative NPCs in sprawling, pseudo-American towns. EarthBound captures the feeling of exported American pop culture of the 80s and 90s; burger bars, wide streets, Mariachi bands out in desert towns, signs that say ‘GAS’, your mum calling you ‘sweetie’, jazz and rock music morphed into 16 bit masterpieces… EarthBound, to me, is a fed back example of this pop culture, as Shigesato Itoi wrote EarthBound in Japan, not America. Throughout my early childhood I wasn’t sure if America was a real place or more like a giant film set that people used, and EarthBound captures that feeling of suspended American reality that you get from The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It gives me that feeling of second hand nostalgia for a time in American history that I have no actual experience with, as I didn’t go there until 2014. EarthBound however, unlike its contemporary American media, clicked with my second hand nostalgia in a slightly different way, as it’s an outsider looking in on that time and place. It has a bashfulness and self depreciation that is more in line with British humour, and characters have over the top, almost comical traits (Porky, your neighbour, for example, feels a lot like a child version of Biff from Back to the Future) EarthBound delightfully evokes 90s adventuring-baseball-bat-weilding kids and sets them in what, to my very young brain, was the biggest playground on earth; America, where Disneyland was on every street, you watched cartoons all day, most people had their own dolphin in a pool and everyone ate burgers like, all. The. Time.

Image – screen caps of EarthBound

Itoi produced, directed and wrote EarthBound (the first appearance of the Mother series outside of Japan), which launched on the SNES system in 1994 for Japan and 1995 for the USA. It wasn’t officially released in Europe until a 2013 virtual console edition on the WiiU. Itoi described the game as “a game that is peculiar... and kind… and fun” (Nintendo YT – EarthBound Virtual Console) which perfectly describes the mood and feel of EarthBound. The gameplay is accessible and easy to master, but includes an auto battle mode that makes “ the skilled kids… worse off when they use it, and the unskilled ones… better” (Itoi interview) to give everyone the opportunity to play. The story however isn’t afraid to present the 4 children in your party with difficult situations and trails; from the first few minutes, you’re told you need to save the Earth from an alien threat by a time travelling bee. As you can tell from my previous sentence, the game doesn’t take itself too seriously either. Itoi’s writing is strange, with the settings and characters endearing in a Twin Peaks way that hook you in right from the beginning (and again for everyone at the back, time travelling bee) Unfortunately though, the poor sales of EarthBoundhas led to decades of the game being legally inaccessible for many fans around the world.

Image: EarthBound ads focused on how stinky the game was... for some reason

EarthBound was plagued with misfortune from the beginning with a long and drawn out production that threatened to collapse as it continued to overrun deadlines. Eventually Satoru Iwata, HAL Laboratory programmer who later became the president of Nintendo, rebuilt the code from scratch over 6 months because the original code was so broken, saving the game in time for the 1994 launch. The American launch of the game was ultimately seen as a financial failure, and only sold about 140,000 copies, and Japan only selling approximately 280,000 units. (For reference, Super Metroid also launched in 1994 and sold 1.42 million units worldwide (VG Charts)) The game wasn’t received well either; the marketing strategy, which included fart smelling scratch and sniff flyers, mostly just led to complaints. The humour was seen as too mature, the gameplay too simple and the look of the game seemed basic compared to contemporary releases. As the SNES made way for the Nintendo 64, for a time it looked like a sequel would be released despite the luke warm reaction to EarthBound. This game, Mother 3, never made it to the N64 however and was finally released in 2006 for the Gameboy Advance, ten years after it was initially announced. Mother 3 never received a translation and was only released in Japan, along with a Japanese release of Mother and EarthBound on a dual cartridge for the Gameboy Advance. The next appearance of EarthBoundwasn’t for another 13 years in 2013, with its release on the WiiU virtual console (it’s first European release), and EarthBound Beginnings (Mother 1) came in 2015 to the same platform for players outside of Japan.

Image – EarthBound release timeline

EarthBound became a symbol of great games that had been left behind by their developers. Websites began to spring up in the late 90s dedicated to fan art and community discussion of EarthBound and its delayed sequel. These discussions evolved into petitions for Nintendo to release anything to do with the series, which Nintendo never really responded to. The community demand for EarthBoundmeant that most new players, especially those in Europe, turned to ROMs to access the game, as cartridges became rarer to get hold of (currently an original SNES cartridge is about £200 on eBay) When Mother 3 was never released in English in 2006, fans made a translation of the whole game that they have said Nintendo can use for free, if it means they will release Mother 3officially outside of Japan. EarthBoundbecame a white whale of gaming with no new content or information and despite the increasing clamour online, and not a glimpse of it was seen for years. Reggie Fils-Aimé, former president of Nintendo of America, even joked on twitter that the burden of questions about Mother 3 made him shrink about an inch in height over his tenure, though he still didn’t say if it was under consideration.

Image – Reggie Fils-Aimé ribbing fans over their Mother 3 demands

Currently, EarthBoundis still effectively abandoned by Nintendo; EarthBound is available on the WiiU virtual console, 3ds virtual console and the SNES classic, and EarthBound Beginnings(Mother 1) is available on the WiiU virtual console, though it’s notoriously 80s in its game mechanics and basically unplayable for a modern audience. Mother 3 has never been officially released outside of Japan. The 3ds, though aging, is still accessible to many players but the WiiU has such a small install base that anything locked to that system is all but unplayable to most. There are no announcements as of yet for any Switch releases, despite the many calls for them, and most players understandably turn to ROMs to be able to play this series. In a time of remakes, remasters and reimaginings there is an EarthBound shaped hole in the Switch library that feels like an easy win for Nintendo. In times of unrest and disturbance cultures like to look back, and our current fixation is the end of the last century with the re-emergence of tapes, vinyl, those really ugly trainers and 90s fashion. The games industry is no different in this; all you need to look at is the Switch eShop to see classic collections of series like MegaMan, Castlevania, Disney Afternoon and the Sega Ages series. The appetite is there for long-term players, and the curiosity is there for those new to the series because EarthBound is so infamous and has been missing for so long. It is a piece of gaming history because of its reimaging of the RPG format, and it’s beleaguered production makes it a miracle EarthBound exists at all. And to that end, even if we never see further instalments of the series, we do have one of the best RPGs ever made in EarthBound. For those looking for a new adventure, or to revisit a classic, or just to see what the fuss is about, see if you can source it for your 3DS or WiiU (or ROM, realistically) Pick up your baseball bat, hop on your bike and head down to the burger bar. Adventure is waiting, and it looks like the 80s. Boing!