EarthBound (Mother 2) · Super Famicom / SNES · 1994 · Japan → North America
EarthBound's American release in June 1995 was accompanied by one of gaming's most notoriously misconceived marketing campaigns; the game sold poorly enough that Nintendo of America declined to localise Mother 3 for twelve years, while the import-and-fan-community around the series grew into one of gaming's most dedicated cult followings.
HAL Laboratory's Mother 2 — EarthBound in English — was released in Japan in August 1994 and localised for North America by Nintendo of America's Treehouse team, reaching Western shelves in June 1995. The localisation was a genuine creative achievement — the Treehouse team expanded and improved much of the script's English dialogue — but Nintendo of America's marketing department responded to the game's irreverence with the "This Game Stinks" campaign: scratch-and-sniff newspaper advertisements featuring grotesque scents and imagery intended to position the game as edgy and countercultural. The campaign reached the wrong audience with the wrong message; EarthBound sold approximately 140,000 copies in North America against Nintendo's projections, making it a significant commercial disappointment. The cult following that developed around the game in the decade after its release — through online fan communities, emulation, and repeated citation by game designers as a foundational influence — eventually made EarthBound one of the most discussed SNES games never to receive a second Nintendo print run.
Nintendo of America's EarthBound marketing in 1995 made a fundamental category error: it treated a deeply literary, emotionally resonant RPG as a gross-out novelty product. The "This Game Stinks" campaign distributed scratch-and-sniff cards and newspaper inserts with odours intended to represent the game's unusual items — a pizza, a banana, a dirty socks — and positioned EarthBound as rebellious, irreverent, and suitable for players who found conventional games boring. The campaign was not wrong that EarthBound was irreverent; it was wrong about who the game's irreverence was for and what kind of irreverence it was. EarthBound's humour was literary and satirical; it parodied consumer culture, suburban America, and RPG conventions simultaneously. Scratch-and-sniff newspaper inserts addressed none of this.
The game found its way into specialist gaming magazines through reviews that recognised its unusual qualities, but the mainstream retail positioning — overshadowed by Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, and the imminent Mortal Kombat franchise on the same platform — left it without the audience that its qualities deserved. Players who encountered it through a friend's copy or a rental were often immediately captured; the problem was that the marketing had not made those first encounters happen at sufficient scale. The commercial disappointment of EarthBound in North America was so complete that Nintendo of America's president Minoru Arakawa reportedly asked "What went wrong?" at a post-release meeting. The answer — bad marketing for a good game — was both obvious and difficult to act on after the fact.
The EarthBound fan community that developed online from the late 1990s onward was one of the first demonstrations that a commercially failed game could sustain an active, creative community through digital means alone. Websites like Starmen.net — founded in 1999 and still active — built extensive archives of EarthBound analysis, fan art, music remixes, and cross-game comparisons that maintained the game's cultural presence through the years when it was out of print, legally unavailable in digital form, and apparently of no commercial interest to Nintendo. When game designers including Toby Fox (Undertale), Shigesato Itoi's writing on the series, and the broader indie RPG community cited EarthBound as a foundational influence, they were describing a game that a generation of designers had experienced through emulation or grey-market cartridge purchases rather than official retail.
Mother 3's 2006 Game Boy Advance release in Japan — and Nintendo's unexplained decision not to localise it for any Western market — produced the most ambitious fan translation project in gaming history: the Mother 3 Fan Translation, released in 2008, involved a team of over thirty contributors who reverse-engineered the GBA's text and script systems, translated and localised the entire game, and produced a patch that was adopted by the entire Western Mother community as the de facto version of the game. When Nintendo eventually released EarthBound and Mother on Western Virtual Console in 2013, the decision was widely attributed to the sustained decade-long advocacy of the fan community that had refused to allow the series to disappear. The Mother 3 localisation remains unofficial; Nintendo has not commented on why.