Mother Turns 20

For all those not in the know, you probably just read that headline and thought, “Your mother just turned 20? What, are the writers at Blend Games like, three years old?” However, everyone else knows that I'm talking about Mother, the predecessor to the SNES RPG that we Americans call EarthBound.

Mother has always been a strange series. I mean, even the title is strange. It comes from the name of the fictional town in the first game called "Mother’s Day". Are you still with me on this? The game was supposed to be released here in the US, but it kept getting pushed back over and over again until it just never saw the light of day. It came out in Japan on the Famicom, which is the Japanese NES, in 1989. You can find a ROM of it online under the title, EarthBound Zero.

A sequel to Earthbound was supposed to come out for the Nintendo Disc Drive (The Nintendo DD, remember that?) over in Japan, but it never did. Instead, Mother 3 was eventually released for the Game Boy Advance and AGAIN never saw the light of day over here in the States (and neither did the Nintendo DD).

But why should you care? Because you like Ness and Lucas from the Smash Bros. series, and unlike the Ice Climbers, you’re actually interested in them because they don’t suck. Also, those little Mr. Saturn heads in Smash Bros., that’s from the Mother series, too. So yep, Mother is pretty awesome. I’d tell you to get Earthbound on your Virtual Console, but it’s not on there yet. But wait, that’s funny, none of the Mother games are out for the Virtual Console in Japan, either.

I remember that when I was looking for Chrono Trigger on the Virtual Console, I found out it wasn’t coming out for it when consulting a GameStop employee because it was coming out for the DS soon and he was right. Could the same be happening to EarthBound? I mean, surely, with the Mother series turning 20 yesterday, and with it being such an IMMENSELY popular game over in Japan, you’d THINK it would be re-released in some way or another. I mean, if we got Sin and Punishment for the VC, why not EarthBound which is arguably as popular, if not more so?