How Nintendo's most unusual RPG series spent years locked in Japan while its fanbase grew in translation
Mother, designed by Shigesato Itoi and released for the Famicom in July 1989, was an RPG set in a fictional American small town — a deliberate inversion of the fantasy settings that Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy had established as genre defaults. The player character, Ninten, navigated suburbs, cities, and eventually a zoo and a zoo's alien research facility; combat was presented in a first-person format borrowed from Dragon Quest but the enemy design — hippies, crows, runaway trucks, extraterrestrial entities — drew on American pop culture rather than European fantasy. The game's writing, in Itoi's characteristically sentimental and comedic voice, was unlike any RPG text of the period.
Nintendo of America localised Mother for NES release in 1990 under the title EarthBound. The translation was completed, a cartridge was manufactured, and a review copy was sent to Nintendo Power. The game was never released commercially. The reasons for the cancellation are not fully documented; the prevailing explanation is that the NES was nearing end of life in North America and Nintendo of America decided the localised version would not recoup its investment against a declining hardware base. The completed localisation — the "EarthBound Zero" prototype — was preserved by an anonymous source and distributed online in the late 1990s, where it built the game's North American fanbase without official distribution.
Mother 2 arrived in Japan in August 1994 as a SNES RPG of considerable ambition — longer than the original, with a more complex narrative, four playable characters, and the same American-suburban setting expanded to an entire world. Nintendo of America localised it as EarthBound and released it in June 1995 with a marketing campaign that stands as one of the gaming industry's most counterproductive promotional strategies. The campaign was built around the game's "scratch and sniff" smell cards — included in the packaging and smelling of garbage, exhaust fumes, and other unpleasant things referenced in the game's story — and the tagline "This Game Stinks." Print advertisements led with the smell cards rather than the game's content or critical reception. The campaign successfully communicated that the game was unusual; it failed to communicate that the game was good.
EarthBound sold approximately 140,000 copies in North America in 1995 — commercially disappointing for a major SNES RPG. The game's reputation grew through word of mouth and internet discussion through the late 1990s and 2000s, developing a devoted fanbase that considered it among the finest games of its era. Its scarcity as a physical cartridge drove secondary market prices above $200 by the mid-2000s. Nintendo's eventual release of EarthBound on Virtual Console in 2013 — eighteen years after the original release — confirmed the fanbase's assessment: it sold immediately and prompted Nintendo to release it on additional platforms.
Mother 3 released for Game Boy Advance in April 2006 in Japan. Nintendo of America's silence on a Western release — maintained through the remaining commercial life of the GBA and into the DS era — prompted the English-speaking EarthBound fanbase to commission their own translation. Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin and a team of contributors translated the entire game and released the patch in October 2008, two and a half years after the Japanese release. The fan translation has been downloaded millions of times and is considered among the most accurate and tonally faithful unofficial translations in game history.
Nintendo has never officially released Mother 3 in English. The game is available on Nintendo Switch Online in Japan; an international release has not been announced. The situation — a critically acclaimed game from a first-party Nintendo developer, playable in English only through an unofficial patch — remains one of the most discussed absences in official game localisation. Mandelin has publicly offered Nintendo the use of the fan translation as a basis for an official release; the offer has not been acknowledged.