EarthBound

• 1. A Game That Stinks

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  EarthBound is a 1994 role-playing game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and its American advertising declared, 'This game stinks.' Nintendo meant it as a joke. In Japan the game was called Mother 2, and it was led by Shigesato Itoi, a Japanese author, musician, and advertiser. It sends a group of young heroes across a world that looks a lot like the real United States. The adventure is packed with gags, and it ends in a climactic fight that critics still discuss. Why did a game with such a loving reputation stumble in 1995? And how did a small, devoted audience bring it back from obscurity?

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• 2. Familiar Yet Strange

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  A payphone serves as a save point in EarthBound. Players pull money from ATMs, fight skateboarders and hippies, and arm themselves with yo-yos. Itoi chose this modern American setting on purpose, hoping the intentionally goofy tone would reach people who did not usually play games. He also hoped to reach groups who were playing fewer games, such as girls. IGN's Scott Thompson called the result 'a love letter to 20th-century Americana'.

  The jokes get stranger from there. The Pencil Eraser removes pencil statues, which were octopus statues in the Japanese version. Players endure hallucinations and battle piles of vomit, taxi cabs, and walking nooses. Kotaku also singled out 'a man who turned himself into a dungeon'. Itoi wrote the dialogue in the Japanese kana script so that it would feel like conversation.

  Most role-playing games of its era used an overworld map, but EarthBound has none. Towns and the outside world blend into one seamless space. The game also uses oblique projection, while most two-dimensional role-playing games use a top-down grid or an isometric view.

  Enemies appear on screen as wandering figures instead of arriving through random encounters. Touching one from behind fills the screen with a translucent green swirl and gives the player the first strike. Touching one with your back turned brings a red swirl and hands the enemy that advantage. Weaker enemies flee, and battles against them are won automatically.

  When a character takes damage, the HP box rolls down like a mechanical counter. That gives the player time to heal someone or win the fight before the number reaches zero. Even a mortal blow has a small chance of leaving the character at 1 HP. Winning battles earns no coins directly, because Ness's father deposits the money into an account that players withdraw at ATMs. If the whole party falls, Ness wakes at the last save point holding half his money, while his friends stay unconscious.

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• 3. Eight Melodies

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  In an unnamed year of the 1990s, a meteorite crashes near the home of a boy named Ness in Eagleland. Ness and his neighbor Pokey investigate and meet Buzz-Buzz, a small creature from the future. Buzz-Buzz warns that in ten years an alien force named Giygas will flood the world with hatred. Humans, animals, and objects will all turn malicious. He asks Ness to collect eight melodies using a Sound Stone, kept in sanctuaries scattered around the world. Then Buzz-Buzz is accidentally killed, and Ness must set out alone.

  In Happy Happy Village, Ness rescues a young girl named Paula from cultists who abuse her psychic abilities. The cultists had fallen under the influence of a Mani Mani statue created by Giygas. After Paula falls into a trap in Threed, she summons Jeff, a child scientist who arrives from Winters in his father's flying saucer. At the seaside resort of Summers, Ness has a vision of Poo, the prince of Dalaam, who joins the party after finishing his Mu Training. With these three companions, Ness fills the Sound Stone.

  Magicant comes next, and there Ness fights his own dark side. Back in Eagleland, the party uses the Phase Distorter to travel back in time and confront Giygas. To keep time travel from destroying their bodies, the friends transfer their souls into robots. In the confrontation, Pokey reveals himself as Giygas's ally by using alien technology. After the party defeats Pokey, he releases Giygas, whose infinite power has transformed him into the embodiment of evil.

  Paula uses her psychic powers to call for help from the whole world through prayers. That aid lets the party defeat Giygas through his fatal weaknesses, human emotions and love. Ness then returns home to his normal life, where a letter from a still-taunting Pokey is waiting.

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• 4. Five Years of Struggle

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  EarthBound Beginnings reached the Famicom in 1989 in Japan, but its sequel took five years to finish. Ape and HAL Laboratory built it together, with Nintendo publishing. Itoi wrote and designed the game, and Satoru Iwata, who later became Nintendo's president and CEO, produced it. Most of the team had not worked on the first game, and most members were unmarried and willing to work all night. The schedule slipped, and the project came under repeated threats of cancellation. Itoi has said the crisis ended when Iwata joined the team.

  Iwata led the HAL team in programming the game itself. Kouji Malta led the larger Ape team, which built specific data such as the text and the maps. The two groups held retreats together at the HAL office, in view of Mount Fuji.

  Itoi first considered sending players into interstellar and interplanetary space. After four months he scrapped the idea as cliché. Instead the story continues from the first game, with Giygas returning as the villain. Players can even choose whether to name their hero after the original protagonist and so carry that story forward. Itoi described the series as built on 'reckless wildness', in which his ideas pushed the staff to find new ways to show scenes. He saw the titles first as games and not as 'big scenario scripts'. When he disliked his team's suggestions for the default character names, he thought up the names himself.

  Around 1990, the team settled on an odometer-style hit counter. The idea began with pachinko balls that would drop off the screen whenever a character was hit. That failed for characters with high health. The bicycle proved one of the hardest features, and its controls resembled a tank's until the team tweaked them. The delivery service was another headache, because the delivery person had to navigate obstacles to reach the player. The programmers decided it would be funnier to have him run through obstacles in a hurry on his way off-screen. Iwata felt the Ape programmers were especially willing to tackle such challenges.

  The diagonal streets in oblique projection demanded extra attention from the artists. Itoi worked to make every town distinct. His favorite became Threed, though before that it was Summers. He called the battle background animations a 'video drug', and one specialist made nearly 200 of them over two years. The final battle dialogue with Giygas came from a childhood memory of a scene Itoi had accidentally seen in the Shintoho film The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty. He found it traumatic.

  The cartridge also fought back against pirates. A pirated copy that triggers the protection throws more enemies at the player. Just before the story ends, the game resets and deletes the save file. IGN declared it 'arguably the most devious and notorious example of creative copy protection'.

  Mother 2 was designed to fit within eight megabits, but it grew twice, first to 12 megabits and then to 24 megabits. It was first scheduled for release in January 1993 on a 12-megabit cartridge. The team finished it around May 1994, and the Japanese release was set for the 27th of August 1994. In the extra months, the team played the game and added small personal touches. Itoi told Weekly Famitsu that Shigeru Miyamoto liked the game, and that it was the first role-playing game Miyamoto had completed. North America would wait about a year more.

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• 5. Soundtrack Influences

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  Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka, the composers of the first Mother game, returned for EarthBound, joined by newcomers Hiroshi Kanazu and Toshiyuki Ueno. Itoi said this score had more jazzy pieces than the first. Suzuki told Weekly Famitsu that the Super NES gave the team more creative freedom. Its SPC700 sound chip offered eight ADPCM channels, against five channels of basic waveforms on the old Nintendo Entertainment System. The result was higher sound quality and music closer to his usual compositions.

  Suzuki composed first on a synthesizer, then worked with programmers to get the pieces into the game. His own pieces play while the player walks the map outside of battle. His favorite is the bicycle music, which he had composed in advance of the job and found fitting. He wrote more than 100 pieces, and much of it never made the game. The team wrote enough music to fill eight megabits of the 24-megabit cartridge, roughly two compact discs. Sony Records released the soundtrack on the 2nd of November 1994.

  Tanaka recalls that he and Suzuki kept referring to the Beach Boys. On the way to Suzuki's home, he often listened to Brian Wilson's 1988 self-titled album. Suzuki said the percussive arrangements drew on two Beach Boys albums, the unreleased Smile and Smiley Smile from 1967. Both shared American themes with Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle from 1968. To Suzuki, Smile evoked the bright and dark sides of America. Song Cycle offered a hazy sound with American humor and hints of Ray Bradbury.

  Randy Newman was the first quintessentially American composer Tanaka could think of, and he named the albums Little Criminals from 1977 and Land of Dreams from 1988. Suzuki shared a fondness for Harry Nilsson's Nilsson Sings Newman from 1970. He also cited John Lennon, because love, a theme in Lennon's music, runs through the game too. Lennon's album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band from 1970 helped Suzuki avoid piling on instruments within the limits of the Super NES.

  Salsa, reggae, and dub shaped the texture of the work. The soundtrack also quotes some classical and folk music directly, and it borrows samples from sources that include commercial pop and rock. Tanaka felt that Wired Magazine Presents: Music Futurists, a 1999 mix tape, captured the spirit of EarthBound. It ran from the space age composer Esquivel to the avant-garde trumpeter Ben Neill, with Sun Ra, Steve Reich, Todd Rundgren, Brian Eno, and Can in between.

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• 6. Translating the Weird

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  Dan Owsen of Nintendo of America began the English version of EarthBound and converted about ten percent of the script before moving to another project. Marcus Lindblom took over around January 1995. Lindblom credits Owsen with coining some of the game's best-known phrases, such as 'say fuzzy pickles'. This followed Nintendo's usual practice, in which a game is developed in Japan and localized in the United States.

  The title changed too. The original Mother had not been released outside Japan, so Mother 2 became EarthBound to avoid confusion about what it followed.

  Lindblom worked alone and with great latitude, because no divisional hierarchy stood over him. Nintendo wanted the script to feel more American than a direct translation would, so he could make it as weird as he liked. The Japanese writer Masayuki Miura translated the Japanese script and explained its tone, which Lindblom described as 'a glass half full'. Lindblom never met or spoke with Itoi. His challenge was culturally translating 'an outsider's view of the U.S.' for American players.

  He reworked the puns and added private jokes and allusions to Bugs Bunny, the comedian Benny Hill, and This Is Spinal Tap. He also wrote the rest of the game's text, including combat messages, prompts, and item names. As one Easter egg, he named a non-player character Nico, after his daughter, who was born during development. He took the day off for her birth, then worked 14-hour days without weekends for the next month.

  Nintendo directed Lindblom to work with the Japanese artists and programmers to remove references to intellectual property, religion, and alcohol. A truck lost its Coca-Cola logo, hospitals lost their red crosses, and tombstones lost their crosses. Alcohol became coffee or cappuccinos. Ness was no longer nude in the Magicant area, and the Happy Happyist blue cultists were redrawn to look less like Ku Klux Klansmen. The music needed few changes, since the team was not concerned about licensing and considered itself somewhat protected as parody. The graphical fixes were not finished until March 1995, and the game was not fully playable until May.

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• 7. Flop, Then Classic

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  In Japan, Mother 2 sold 518,000 units and ranked as the tenth best-selling game of 1994 in the country. EarthBound reached North America on the 5th of June 1995. It sold about 140,000 units in the United States, for a worldwide total of approximately 658,000.

  Nintendo spent about $2 million on marketing, and the campaign grew out of the game's odd humor. It ran as part of Nintendo's larger 'Play It Loud!' campaign and featured foul-smelling scratch and sniff advertisements. GamePro reported more reader complaints about that ad than about any other advertisement of 1995. Each copy of the game also shipped with a strategy guide, which added cost. Aaron Linde of Shacknews believed the price of the packaged game ultimately curtailed sales. With sales poor and the Super NES being phased out, the game never received a European release. Inside Nintendo, the American release was viewed as unsuccessful.

  Kotaku later called the 1995 release 'a dud', blaming 'a bizarre marketing campaign' and cartoonish graphics. Role-playing games were not popular in the United States then, and visual taste ran closer to Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. Among the original reviewers, Nicholas Dean Des Barres of DieHard GameFan found the game as fun as Final Fantasy III and called it 'highly intelligent'. GamePro praised the music and humor but criticized the story and graphics. Lindblom and his team were devastated by the response. He felt critics who prized graphics ignored the changes the game made to the role-playing formula.

  Years later, writers called the game original and unique. IGN's Scott Thompson found it both 'bizarre and memorable', though he warned about a steep difficulty curve. Simon Parkin of Official Nintendo Magazine thought the script was its best asset, swinging between humorous and poignant. Reviewers concluded that the game had aged well.

  Christian Donlan, writing in 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die, said the game was 'name-checked by the video gaming cognoscenti more often than it's actually been played'. At least three reader polls ranked it among the best games of all time. It is credited as an influence on Costume Quest, Undertale, Omori, Lisa, and the webcomic Homestuck. The novelist Hiromi Kawakami even told Itoi that she had played it about 80 times.

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• 8. Fans Win It Back

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  Reid Young started a fansite in 1997 while in middle school, and it grew into Starmen.net. It became the definitive fan community for EarthBound on the web, with what Shacknews called almost inexplicable growth. Polygon's Colin Campbell wrote that 'few gaming communities are as passionate and active'. The community drafted petitions signed by several thousand people for specific English-language Mother releases. In time, its request shifted to wanting only for Nintendo to recognize its interest.

  A 2007 campaign for an English Mother 3 produced The EarthBound Anthology, a full-color, 270-page art book sent to Nintendo and the press. Shacknews called it 'the greatest gaming love letter ever created'. Little response came back, so fans localized Mother 3 themselves. Clyde Mandelin led the translation from its announcement in November 2006 to its finish in October 2008. Fangamer, a merchandising site spun off from Starmen.net, then printed a professional-quality strategy guide.

  In 1996, Nintendo announced Mother 3 for the Nintendo 64, to be released on the 64DD peripheral. It sank into development hell and was canceled in 2000 when the 64DD flopped. A Japanese television advertisement in April 2003 revealed that Mother 3 and a combined Mother 1+2 cartridge were in development for the Game Boy Advance. Mother 3 became a bestseller in Japan in 2006, but it never received a North American release.

  When the Wii Virtual Console launched in 2006, IGN expected EarthBound to be a high priority. Readers of Nintendo Power ranked it the most desired release, yet the Wii version never appeared. Lindblom doubted music licensing was the problem. He guessed that Nintendo did not grasp the scale of the game's support. At the end of 2012, Itoi revealed that a rerelease was moving forward, and a Nintendo Direct confirmed it in January 2013. Iwata cited fan response on the Miiverse social platform as the reason for the wider release. By 2013, physical copies were worth twice their initial retail price.

  Ness meanwhile gained a second fame as a playable fighter in the Super Smash Bros. series, debuting in the first game in 1999. In Europe, which never saw an EarthBound release, he was better known for that role than for his original one. He returned in Melee, Brawl, and later entries, and Lucas, the hero of Mother 3, joined him in Brawl.

  The Wii U Virtual Console release came to Japan in March 2013, and the worldwide launch followed in July. It included a free online recreation of the Player's Guide. The New Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console received the game in March 2016, and the Super NES Classic Edition included it in September 2017. In February 2022, Nintendo rereleased EarthBound worldwide on the Nintendo Classics service, alongside EarthBound Beginnings.

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