Base: Mother · NES · 1998 · Translation
Creator: Demiforce (from Nintendo of America's prototype)
A fan release of the original Mother (NES) in English, distributing the localisation Nintendo of America had completed in 1990 but never commercially released.
Nintendo of America completed an English localisation of Mother for the NES around 1990 under the title "EarthBound", 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. In 1998 a prototype cartridge of the cancelled localisation was found and dumped, and the group Demiforce released it online as "EarthBound Zero", patching the ROM so that it ran properly on emulators and giving it a new title to distinguish it from the SNES game. The release was therefore Nintendo's own translation rather than a fresh fan translation. It 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.