Bad smells may have been a thing with EarthBound. These pages left a literal stench in gaming magazines. It was unabashedly juvenile, filled with gross-out humor and self-deprecating proclamations about how “ this game stinks,” which were accompanied by scratch-and-sniff ads. The game’s marketing campaign compounded the issue. Why would you want to run around a town that might look like where you grew up when you could travel to a far-away place and fight amazing beasts? It stood out, and that might not have been helpful at the time. In contrast, EarthBound took place in a time and setting that looked very much like our own. They contained stories that were often centered around defeating a great, unspeakable evil and fantastical beasts. Popular role-playing games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were heavily, for lack of a better word, Tolkienian. One reason for its lackluster initial sales - it sold fewer than 150,000 copies then - might have been its unusual setting. “I don’t remember seeing at any of the video stores I used to rent games from, and I learned years later that it apparently sold terribly and was pretty difficult to find.”ĮarthBound did in fact bumble through its nascent years, as its identity might have been too esoteric for the gaming community in 1994, when it launched. “I figured I’d give it a try since it was apparently very good,” he said.
#EARTHBOUND BEGINNINGS CIA ROM SERIES#
He was searching for more games from the Zelda series on ROM sites after playing 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64, and stumbled upon EarthBound when he saw it nestled among a pirate site’s best-rated games. Now a big fan of the game, he first found out about EarthBound via emulation. “I remember seeing all the big names on the top-rated list, such as Super Mario World and Zelda, and recognizing most of them except for EarthBound,” one Redditor, stfnotguilty, told me. Fans who wanted to play the game without paying through the nose for old, Super NES retail copies had only one choice: bending the law. Yet it was emulation - a tool famously abhorred by Nintendo - that helped EarthBound clinch its cult status.
The fans even took it upon themselves to painstakingly put together a translation of Mother 3, the long-awaited 2006 follow-up to Mother and EarthBound, when Nintendo kept it exclusive to the Japanese market. To show their love, the team at created a 270-page EarthBound artbook, and fans carried out letter and phone campaigns to get a North American release of the Mother 1 + 2 compilation on the Game Boy Advance, albeit with little success. Many fans have spent decades clamoring for Nintendo to do more with the series, which consists of just three games released over more than a decade. Undertale is probably the best-known example of this genre, and it owes much of its goofy yet lovable tone to EarthBound.ĮarthBound enjoys a dedicated fan base of North American and European players who revere it as a classic in the JRPG genre. It’s part of a series known as Mother in Japan, but it’s EarthBound that has left its fingerprints all over a growing genre of games colloquially known as Motherlikes in some communities. EarthBound, the endearing Japanese role-playing game from the Super Nintendo era, delivers a very particular brand of surreal humor and sentimentality.
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