Base: Mother · NES · 1998 · Translation
Creator: Tomato (Clyde Mandelin) and others
A fan translation of the original Mother (NES) into English, completing the localisation that Nintendo of America had prepared in 1990 but never commercially released.
Nintendo of America had produced a near-complete English localisation of Mother for the NES by 1990 under the title "EarthBound" — a localised prototype ROM exists — but cancelled the release as the NES market declined. Western fans who knew of the game only through its unreleased status and its celebrated sequel EarthBound (SNES) were unable to play Shigesato Itoi's original work. The fan translation, developed primarily by Clyde Mandelin (known as Tomato), provided an English patch using the existing Nintendo localisation as a partial basis and filling gaps with new translation work. The patch circulated widely and became the primary means by which Western fans experienced the original game until Nintendo released it on the Wii U Virtual Console as "EarthBound Beginnings" in 2015.