Earthbound: Cult Classic

There are cult franchises in pretty much every medium of entertainment. Star Trek, Sailor Moon, KISS, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Metroid, and many more permeate our minds. These are franchises that aren't necessarily the most popular in the world, but the fans who follow them, do so with an almost religious, or cult like(see how that works) mentality.

Among video games, few franchises fit this idea more than the Mother/Earthbound series. In North America, there has only been one release, Mother 2, known as Earthbound in the US. It is one of the biggest cult phenomena in gaming.

What makes Earthbound such a big cult hit is the fact that it was a mass produced Super Nintendo game that was initially unsuccessful. After the launch of Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64, and the inclusion of Ness, the main character from Earthbound, the game faced a brand new audience that it never had before.

There are a few things that make the release of the original game interesting. First of all, the game was the only Super NES game that shipped with a Nintendo Power player's guide. This made the game have a large, oversized box. The cover art for the US release was kind of uninspired. It just had Star Man(not to be confused with Starman from the Super Mario series), an enemy from the game featured on it, with reflections of the main cast in its eyes.

I remember seeing this box prominently on display at my local Toys R Us. I thought that it looked weird, since it was so big. I didn't have any idea what the game was, or the fact that it was released by Nintendo. Looking back, I'm disappointed that it didn't pique my interest more.

The second thing that made the release of Earthbound interesting was the fact that it was a very late Super NES release. It was released in 1995, the year before the N64 came out. This made the game a harder sale, and even caused Nintendo to kind of put it on the back burner as far as marketing it. It was consequently a flop in North America.

Earthbound is a JRPG(Japanese RPG... I don't have to spell out what RPG means, do I?). It's quite a unique game, however. It takes a lot of the ideas and standards of other JRPGs, and flips them upside-down.

The first thing that's unique about Earthbound is the fact that it takes place in a modern setting. The player is a young boy who wears a baseball cap, and wields a bat as his primary melee weapon, he also controls Psychokenetic power(PK).The world around you is composed of cities and suburbs, with streets, subways, and forests. The game is also unique in the fact that it doesn't take itself as seriously as many other JRPGs. One of the things that makes the game so popular is its sense of humor. The game also takes music cues from well known musicians. As the player makes his or her way through the game, they'll hear samples of the likes of The Beatles, The Who, and Chuck Berry.

If you want to play a legal copy of Earthbound now, you will have to either have been one of the lucky people with the foresight to have bought an original copy of the game, have bought it before it began to become as big of a cult hit as it has, or shell around $200 USD for the game. Sites like eBay, and Amazon post the price of the game loose, that is the cartridge alone, for $200. If you want the game with the player's guide, or a complete set, you can expect to shell out several thousand.

When Nintendo originally announced their 2006 console, the Wii, the first thing that they announced was the virtual console service. Personally, I thought that this was a tremendously good idea. You would now have a Nintendo system that you could purchase older, and in many cases, hard to find games and play them on one central system. If you wanted to play the originals legally up to that point, you would have to have the original system, and the game, and both had to actually work. If you still had your original copies and systems, and had the foresight to take care of them, this wasn't a problem. With rarer games sometimes costing much more than new, modern releases, however, sometimes you just couldn't get your hands on them to play. I bought Final Fantasy IV(III) for the SNES as late as 2007 for $50 USD. With the release of the Virtual Console, though, this problem would be a thing of the past.

The pricing on the Virtual Console was spot on, too. You could buy an NES game for $5, an SNES game for $8, and a N65 game for $10. The service also had game for other platforms, such as the Sega Genesis and Master system, the Turbo Graphix 16, the NEO GEO, and the Commodore 64.

Needless to say, with the announcement of the Virtual Console, Earthbound fans who didn't get to experience the original on the SNES were thrilled. I was among them. Nintendo announced it as one as coming soon early in the system's life cycle. Week after week, we waited for Earthbound to be released. Week after week, we were mildly disappointed, and had to make due with other popular games in other series.

Eventually, Nintendo of America finally shot the idea off Earthbound ever coming to the Virtual Console in North America down. They even went so far as to take the game out of the Nintendo Classics section on Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii. The Classics section featured playable demo versions of games like Super Mario Bros., Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Kirby's Adventure, and others. Nintendo cited legal problems with some of the music cues in the game. The argument holds water, though. In this increasingly lawsuit happy world, it wouldn't make sense to risk being taken on by the people who owned the original content. This meant, however, that the original SNES cartridge version of the game would reach remarkably high prices for a mass produced title.

It's interesting to note the fan base that Earthbound has. Like I said before, among cult video game series, it likely ranks at the top. There are many fan sites online that talk about, and promote the game. There is even a convention, just for Earthbound.

Fast forward to 2013. Nintendo announces that they are releasing a Virtual Console service, like the one that was on Wii, on their newest platform, Wii U. This announcement coincides with the 30^th anniversary of the Nintendo Famicom(NES) in Japan. To celebrate this milestone, Nintendo is currently running a promotion where you can buy select NES and Super NES Virtual Console titles on the Wii U for $.30 each, for a limited time. There are several very good games that have been, and are to be included in this promotion, such as Kirby's Adventure, Punch-Out!!, and Super Metroid.

Earthbound fans were up in arms when they discovered that the game was part of the Famicom promotion in Japan. On the Wii U, there is a service known as Miiverse, which is essentially a social media network that is based on games, and is integrated into the Wii U. One of the cool things that you can do in the Miiverse, is go to the pages for other regions. Fans of the series from North America, and Europe(where the game was never released), went to the Japanese Mother 2 Miiverse page and began spamming it with pleas to bring the game to their regions.

Apparently this got the attention of the people at NCL. During last week's Nintendo Direct video, where the company brings news regarding new titles and other things 'directly to you', Nintendo finally announced Earthbound's upcoming Wii U Virtual Console release. This announcement overshadowed other news, including that of a brand new sequel to Zelda: A Link to the Past. Satoru Iwata even talked about the impact of the fans posting on Miiverse. It's interesting to note, however that Bill Trinen of NOA has spoken recently about the Virtual Console release. He stated that the game is not altered in any way from the original version, and that he was completely unaware of any legal problems with music in the game, or anything else. This kind of makes me wonder exactly why it took NOA so long to get this game out.

This re-release, seven years in the making has people wondering, though. There are two other titles in the Mother series. A prequel to the SNES game on the NES, and a sequel on the Game Boy Advance. Fans of the series are wondering if we'll ever have a legitimate version of Mother or Mother 3 in the US. There is a hacked ROM of Mother 3, where the game has been translated into English, floating around the Internet. The creator of this hack has even publicly approached Nintendo about using this version for the official release. He has even stated that he will change it to fit whatever standards Nintendo wants.

This is how dedicated Earthbound fans are. It's strange to know that with fans that were clamoring for the games this much, fans who petitioned Nintendo again, and again; fans who raised money to try to get these games released, or re-released in their region, that it took the company this long to finally take notice of these legions of fans.

With any luck, Nintendo of America will stop ignoring us, the hardcore fans. Hope springs from the fact that Earthbound is finally coming to Virtual Console, and the fact that Satrou Iwata is taking his place as not only the president of Nintendo Worldwide, but also as the CEO of Nintendo of America. Iwata knows the game, he's been making games since the '70s. I'm excited to see what his tenure as the head of our Nintendo is going to be.