EarthBound · SNES · Nintendo of America · 1995
EarthBound's North American release came in an oversized box containing the game, a 128-page full-colour strategy guide, and a set of scratch-and-sniff stickers corresponding to specific in-game enemies — a packaging concept that used smell as a deliberate extension of the game's surreal humour.
Nintendo of America's EarthBound packaging was a deliberate escalation from the game's unusual marketing campaign, which had used the tagline "This Game Stinks" and full-page magazine spreads depicting sweaty, unpleasant imagery. The large box — roughly four times the volume of a standard SNES cartridge box — contained the full-colour Player's Guide as an included item rather than a separately purchased accessory, along with scratch-and-sniff sticker cards. The stickers corresponded to specific enemies in the game: a pile of vomit had its own smell, as did a smelly ghost and other characters from EarthBound's deliberately gross and surreal enemy roster. The packaging acknowledged that the game was difficult enough to require the strategy guide — Shigesato Itoi's RPG had a reputation for punishing difficulty in its late sections — while making the inclusion feel like a feature rather than an admission. The scratch-and-sniff cards extended the game's aesthetic philosophy into physical space, treating grossness as a participatory experience. The marketing campaign's intentional anti-marketing tone — "This Game Stinks" was not intended to appeal to everyone — matched the game's own design philosophy of appealing deeply to a specific audience rather than broadly to any audience. EarthBound sold modestly in North America on initial release; its reputation grew dramatically in the following decades as the RPG community recognised its achievement, making sealed copies of the original packaging among the most expensive SNES items on the collector's market.
Using packaging that extended the game's own surreal humour into physical space — treating smell as a gameplay element and anti-marketing as a brand identity.
Including a full-colour strategy guide in the box rather than selling it separately was a commercially unusual decision that reflected Nintendo of America's awareness of EarthBound's difficulty. The game's late sections — particularly the final sequence of boss encounters — were genuinely challenging enough that many players would reach them without the guide and struggle to complete the game. By including the guide, Nintendo reduced the barrier to completion while removing the separate revenue stream from guide sales. The calculation implied that EarthBound's success depended more on players finishing and recommending the game than on ancillary guide sales.
The guide's full-colour production and detailed enemy and item databases made it genuinely useful rather than cursory. Players who received EarthBound as a gift received a complete experience without any additional purchase; players who found the game difficult had an immediate resource rather than a separate trip to the book section of their game retailer. The pack-in guide precedent influenced subsequent Nintendo releases of difficult or complex RPGs, though no subsequent SNES release matched the physical scale of EarthBound's box.
EarthBound's modest original sales and enthusiastic critical reappraisal created one of the collector's market's most dramatic appreciation curves. A game that sold 140,000 copies in North America — respectable but not exceptional for an SNES RPG — developed a devoted following through internet word-of-mouth in the late 1990s and 2000s, as players who had discovered it through emulation sought original hardware copies. The large box, scratch-and-sniff cards, and strategy guide made a complete-in-box copy a substantially larger physical object than any comparable SNES title, and the specific fragility of the scratch-and-sniff cards — which degrade with age and become unusable — makes a fully intact, all-stickers-preserved copy genuinely rare.
Sealed copies of EarthBound in original packaging have sold at auction for prices that made mainstream news coverage, with high-grade examples reaching five figures. The packaging's cultural significance amplified by the game's belated critical recognition created a feedback loop: the more famous EarthBound became, the more the original box became a cultural artefact, and the higher its collector value rose. Nintendo's release of EarthBound on Virtual Console in 2013 — decades after its original release — validated the community's long advocacy while inevitably reducing the urgency of owning original hardware.