Mother
1989 · RPG · NES / Famicom
Overview
Mother (1989) is Shigesato Itoi's Famicom role-playing game set in a late-20th-century America, with baseball bats and psychic powers in place of swords and magic. Its finished English version was shelved, and it finally appeared in the West in 2015 as EarthBound Beginnings.
Deep Dive
Ninten, a boy living in late-20th-century America, uses his great-grandfather's research into psychic powers to deal with a wave of paranormal events. Lloyd, Ana and Teddy join his party, and the antagonist is the alien Giegue. Its random encounters and first-person battles follow Dragon Quest, which the game also parodies, but the heroes fight with baseball bats, toy guns and PSI powers. Critics praised its parody of Dragon Quest but found the difficulty and balance harsh.
Developer Story
Shigesato Itoi pitched the idea to Shigeru Miyamoto, who produced the game. It was developed by Ape and Nintendo Tokyo R&D Products, with music by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka, and released on 27 July 1989. It sold about 400,000 copies in Japan, the sixth best-selling game of 1989 there.
Did You Know?
- Itoi took the title partly from John Lennon's song "Mother".
- An English localisation, Earth Bound, was finished in 1990 but shelved; a prototype cartridge surfaced in 1998 and circulated as EarthBound Zero.
- Its 1994 sequel, Mother 2, reached the US in 1995 as EarthBound.
Sources & further reading
- EarthBound Beginnings — Wikipedia
