EarthBound Beginnings

EarthBound Beginnings, known in Japan as Mother, is a role-playing game developed by Ape and Nintendo and released for the Famicom in 1989. Written and directed by the Japanese copywriter and essayist Shigesato Itoi, it is the first entry in the Mother series and the predecessor to the cult-classic Super Nintendo game EarthBound (Mother 2).

The game broke from the fantasy template that dominated console RPGs at the time, setting its story in a stylized late-twentieth-century America. The player controls a young boy named Ninten, who uses PSI powers and ordinary objects, baseball bats, toys, household items, to investigate a wave of strange phenomena, with a tone that mixes earnest adventure, surreal comedy, and genuine melancholy. Its quirky, modern setting and emotional writing made it a landmark, even as its difficulty and rough edges showed the limits of the hardware.

For decades the game was a famous gap in the West. A complete English localization was prepared around 1990 (widely known to collectors as "EarthBound Zero") but was never officially released, surviving only as a prototype cartridge and later a ROM. Nintendo finally gave the game an official Western release in June 2015, on the Wii U Virtual Console, under the name EarthBound Beginnings.

In 2026, after nineteen-ish years of community effort, fans completed a full remake of the original Mother using the 16-bit engine of its SNES sequel, distributed as a patch and reuniting the whole Mother saga in the EarthBound art style.