Mother (video game)

Mother, (マザー) officially known outside of Japan as EarthBound Beginnings, is a role-playing video game developed by Ape Inc., Nintendo Tokyo R&D Products, and Pax Softnica and published by Nintendo for the Family Computer. It is the first entry in the Mother series and was first released in Japan on July 27, 1989. The game was re-released in Japan along with its sequel on the single-cartridge compilation Mother 1+2 for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. The game follows a young American boy named Ninten as he uses his great-grandfather's studies on psychic powers to put an end to the paranormal phenomena spiraling the country into disarray.

Writer and director Shigesato Itoi pitched Mother's concept to Shigeru Miyamoto while visiting Nintendo's headquarters for other business. Though Miyamoto rejected the proposal at first, he eventually gave Itoi a development team. Modeled after the gameplay of the Dragon Quest series, Mother subverted its fantasy genre contemporaries by being set in an offbeat parody of the late 20th-century United States. Itoi sought to incorporate standard RPG staples within the framework of a modern-day setting, parodying Western culture and Americana; throughout the game, players use medication and hospitals to revive their health, utilize baseball bats and toy guns to fight enemies, and encounter aliens, robots, possessed objects, and brainwashed animals and humans. Mother uses random encounters to enter a menu-based, first-person perspective battle system.

Mother sold around 400,000 copies upon its release, where it was praised for its similarities to the Dragon Quest series and its simultaneous parody of the genre's tropes, though its high difficulty level and balance issues polarized critics. A North American localization of Mother was completed and slated for release as Earth Bound, but was abandoned as being commercially nonviable. A finished prototype was later found and publicly circulated on the Internet under the informal title EarthBound Zero. Though many critics considered Mother's sequel to be similar and an overall better implementation of its gameplay ideas, Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com wrote that Mother importantly generated interest in video game emulation and the historical preservation of unreleased games.

In 1994, Mother's sequel, Mother 2: Gīgu no Gyakushū, was released in Japan for the Super Famicom, which was localized and released in America in 1995 under the name "EarthBound". EarthBound initially flopped in the U.S., but later gained a cult following and became retrospectively viewed as a cult classic. EarthBound was followed by the Japan-only sequel Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance in 2006. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of EarthBound's U.S. release, Mother was released globally as EarthBound Beginnings for the Wii U Virtual Console in June 2015, and was released alongside EarthBound for Nintendo Switch Online in February 2022.

Gameplay
Mother is a single-player, role-playing video game set in a "slightly offbeat", late 20th-century United States as interpreted by Japanese author Shigesato Itoi. Throughout the game, the player fights hippies, undead zombies, mind-controlled humans, animate objects and vehicles, extraterrestrial life, robots and crazed animals. The world is composed mainly of towns, deserts, swamps, forests, and caves the player must venture through. The game deliberately avoids traits of its Japanese role-playing game contemporaries: it does not strictly adhere to the fantasy or science fiction genres, despite numerous instances of each occurring within the game. The player fights in warehouses and laboratories instead of in standard dungeons, and rather than trekking from to each town on foot, the player is able to take trains to travel from area to area. Instead of swords, assault weapons, and magic, the player uses baseball bats, toy guns, frying pans, knives, and inherent psychic abilities. The game's main protagonists, Ninten, Lloyd, and Ana, are roughly 11–12 years of age. The player can press a button to have Ninten "check" or "talk" with nearby people, animals, and objects. The game shares similarities with its sequel, EarthBound: there is a game save option through using a phone to call Ninten's father, an option to store items with one of Ninten's twin sisters at home, and an automated teller machine for banking money (ATM). The members of Ninten's party are all visible on the overworld screen at once, and are analogous to EarthBound party members in style and function. Differing from the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series, Mother world map does not keep locations separate, instead connecting all areas in one game world. The landscape's structures are portrayed with an oblique projection, requested by Itoi at a programmer's suggestion.

Like the Dragon Quest series, Mother uses a random encounter combat system. The player explores the overworld from a top-down perspective and occasionally enters a first-person perspective battle sequence where the player chooses attack options from a series of menus. On their turn, the player selects between options to fight, guard, check enemy attributes, run away, use items, or use offensive, defensive, or healing psychic powers. The player can also set the battle on autopilot with the "auto" option. Upon being assigned a command, the party members attack in an order determined by a random number generator and the character's speed status. Critical hits register with the series' signature "SMAAAASH" text and sound. If the enemy or character's HP reaches 0, the battle is won and the opponent becomes unconscious; if a character or separate enemy becomes unconscious, it can only be reversed by using PSI on that character or enemy. If every character becomes unconscious, the game transitions to a blank screen, where it asks the player if he wants to continue; an affirmative response brings Ninten, conscious, back to the last save point, with half the money on his person at the time of his defeat. Upon winning the battle, the player may receive experience points, new psychic powers, and other points to improve their overall status. Enough experience points will increase the character's level, which somewhat determines the increase of the character's physical and psychic points. There is also a chance an item can be obtained after an enemy is defeated. Once the battle is won, Ninten's father deposits money into an account, which can be withdrawn from an ATM. In towns, players can purchase weapons, items, and food from fast food restaurants and department stores. Weapons and specific items, such as pendants, medallions, and rings, can be equipped to respectively increase character strength and defense. Items can be used for a multitude of purposes, such as healing, clearing obstacles, and unlocking doors. Towns also contain useful facilities such as hospitals, where players can be healed for a fee; it is half of whatever cash the player has on hand at that moment.

Plot
In the early 1900s, a young, married couple mysteriously vanish from their rural American town. Two years later, the husband, George, inexplicably returns and begins a strange study in complete seclusion. His wife, Maria, is never heard from again. In 1988, the home of a young boy named Ninten is attacked by a poltergeist. After Ninten fends it off, his father tells him that his great-grandfather studied psychic powers, and asks him to investigate crises occurring across the world. Resolving some in his hometown of Mother's Day, Ninten travels to the land of Magicant, where its monarch, Queen Mary, asks Ninten to collect the parts of a song that appears in her dreams to play them for her. Ninten returns to Earth and befriends Lloyd, a child prodigy who is bullied at Tinkle Elementary School. The two travel to the town of Snowman to deliver a lost hat to Ana, a young girl with psychic powers. Ana tells Ninten she saw him in a vision, and joins the party in hopes of finding her missing mother.

Finding multiple parts of Queen Mary's song, Ninten is harassed at a karaoke bar in the town of Valentine by a gang leader named Teddy. Surrendering after a fistfight, Teddy joins Ninten's party to avenge the deaths of his parents, who were killed at Holy Loly Mountain; Teddy forces Lloyd to stay behind. In a cabin at the mountain's base, Ana pulls Ninten aside and asks him to always be by her side. The two dance and profess their mutual love. A giant robot then attacks the group, with Lloyd arriving in a tank to destroy the robot; he succeeds, but accidentally hits the party and critically wounds Teddy, leading him to rejoin the party. They take a boat out on a nearby lake, and a whirlpool pulls them into an underwater laboratory; in it, they find a robot named EVE, which claims to have been built by George to protect Ninten. When the laboratory floods, they leave for the mountain's peak. After another robot attacks them, EVE self-destructs to destroy it, leaving behind the seventh part of Queen Mary's song. The party then warps to Magicant, where Ninten plays the collected melodies to Queen Mary; recalling the rest of the song, she teaches Ninten the eighth and final melody and reminisces about an alien named Giygas that she had loved as her own child. Revealing she is George's wife, Maria, Queen Mary vanishes; Magicant, actually a mirage created by her consciousness, vanishes with her.

The party is warped back to Holy Loly Mountain. Large rocks block the mountain peak's entrance, but are cleared by Maria's consciousness. There, the party encounters the mother ship that the fully-grown Giygas is on. While attacking them, the alien expresses its gratitude to Ninten's family for raising it, but explains that George stole vital information from its people that could have been used to betray them, proceeding to accuse Ninten of interfering with their plans. Giygas offers to save Ninten alone if he boards the mother ship, only for Ninten to decline. The party then begins to sing Maria's lullaby, while Giygas tries to quiet them through its attacks; they persist and finish the song, causing Giygas to be emotionally overwhelmed at the thought of Maria's motherly love. Giygas swears they will meet again and flies off in the mother ship; the party then faces the player as the credits roll behind them.

Development
Mother was developed by Ape and Pax Softnica and published by Nintendo. While visiting Nintendo for other work, copywriter Shigesato Itoi pitched his idea for a role-playing game set in contemporary times to the company's Shigeru Miyamoto. He thought the setting would be unique for its incongruence with role-playing genre norms, as daily life lacked the pretense for magic powers and they could not simply give the child characters firearms as weapons. Itoi's project proposal suggested how the natural limitations could be circumvented. Miyamoto met with him and praised the idea, though he was not sure whether Itoi "could pull it off". As an advertiser, Itoi was used to concept proposals preceding the staffing process, but Miyamoto explained that video game concepts needed people who signed on to "make" the product. Itoi was overcome with "powerlessness".

Miyamoto was also hesitant to work with Itoi at a time when companies were pushing major celebrity product endorsements, as Itoi's involvement would be for such a game. When the two met next, Miyamoto brought the documentation from a text adventure game and told Itoi that he would have to write similar documentation himself. Miyamoto said that he knew from his own experience that the game would only be as good as the effort Itoi invested, and that he knew Itoi could not invest the appropriate time with his full-time job. Itoi restated his interest and reduced his workload, so Miyamoto assembled a development team. Upon assessing for compatibility, they began production in Ichikawa, Chiba. Itoi had said earlier that he wanted his work environment to feel like an extracurricular club consisting of volunteers and working out of an apartment, which Miyamoto tried to accommodate. Itoi wrote the game's script and commuted from Tokyo, a process he found "exhausting". Even with asking Itoi to prioritize the development process, Miyamoto received criticism of acquiescing to celebrity and of hiring a copywriter not up for the task. Miyamoto said that his decision to pursue the project was based on his confidence in Itoi. According to Itoi in a 1989 Famitsu interview, the word "mothership" was the influence for the game's title, although he states the title had other meanings too; in particular, Mother was released in Japan on July 27, 1989, for the Famicom (known as the Nintendo Entertainment System outside Japan).

Music
The game's soundtrack was composed by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka. Tanaka was a video game composer working for Nintendo who had previously composed for games such as Super Mario Land and Metroid, while Suzuki was a composer and musician for bands of many different genres. The NES was only able to play three notes at a time, which Suzuki has noted greatly limited what he was able to produce, as he could not create some of the sounds he wanted.

An eleven-track album of songs inspired by the game's soundtrack was recorded in Tokyo, London, and Bath and released by CBS/Sony Records on August 21, 1989. The album contained mostly vocal arrangements in English and was likened by RPGFan reviewer Patrick Gann to compositions by the Beatles and for children's television shows. He found the lyrics "cheesy and trite" but appreciated the "simple statements" in "Eight Melodies" and the "quirky and wonderful" "Magicant". Only the last song on the album is in chiptune. Gann ultimately recommended the 2004 remastered release over this version. The game's soundtrack contains several tracks later used in subsequent series games.

English localization
An English localization began for Mother in 1990 and was completed in September of that year. In accordance with Nintendo of America's content policies, all religious iconography, blood, breast nipples, cigarettes, and references to violence and alcohol were removed. Additionally, NPCs similar to Peanuts characters were also altered to avoid potential legal prosecution. Several features and enhancements were added to the original, including a run button, several in-game options, and an expanded ending. Holiday-based town names were renamed to appeal to mature audiences, while some maps and graphics were redesigned for difficulty or aesthetic purposes. All changes were made and approved by Nintendo Co., Ltd. and Mother's development team. The localization's director, Phil Sandhop, coined Mother's English title as Earth Bound in order for the game to appeal to American audiences. Nintendo of America also trademarked a separate title, Space Bound, as a potential title for the game's sequel.

Plans finalized for Earth Bound included an English release of the Mother album soundtrack and an 80-page instruction manual styled after a diary belonging to George. Earth Bound was advertised and scheduled for a fall 1991 release, but was deemed unprofitable and subsequently shelved. Earth Bound's cancellation has since been attributed to the lack of market interest in the RPG genre at the time, along with the cost of manufacturing and marketing Earth Bound in light of the North American release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. In 1994, efforts were made to release Earth Bound in the United States and Canada, but were halted due to the costs associated with it. According to Phil Sandhop in an interview with LostLevels.org, "the Mother project and localizing it really opened up a few eyes at Nintendo. They began working closer with Nintendo of America and the other subsidiaries to produce artwork for games that would be appropriately received anywhere in the world and not need localization". The name Earth Bound would later be carried over as the English title of Mother 2, EarthBound, albeit with a removed space.

Emulation
In 1998, a completed prototype cartridge of Earth Bound was found by a fan translation group named Neo Demiforce (or just Demiforce), who had been working on a preliminary English translation of Mother before the prototype was discovered. It had been sold earlier that year for $125 to an unknown buyer named "Kenny Brooks" by a game collector named Greg Mariotti, who had discovered the prototype several years earlier at a game retailer. Interested in acquiring the cartridge to publicly dump its ROM for preservation purposes, Steve Demeter, the head of Demiforce, "bullied" Mariotti to disclose Brooks' email address; Mariotti ultimately severed ties with Demiforce. A Mother fan named "EBounding" in contact with Brooks soon gave the information to Demiforce, desiring to play the game himself. Demiforce then entered into negotiations with Brooks; as part of them, the EarthBound fan community would donate $400 for Demiforce to temporarily obtain the cartridge from Brooks in order to dump its ROM. To distinguish Earth Bound from EarthBound, the prototype's title screen was altered to display the name "EarthBound Zero", a tribute by Demeter to Street Fighter Alpha (Street Fighter Zero in Japan).

On April 27, 1998, EarthBound Zero was released to the public, along with an original back-up of Earth Bound's code. In order for Earth Bound to work on one of the most proficient NES emulators at the time, NESticle, a single byte of code in the ROM was modified; however, this led to a checksum being triggered at various points in the game, which would indefinitely lock the game on an anti-piracy screen. Another byte was modified to disable the screens entirely, and it was publicly distributed once again. Skepticism about the cartridge's authenticity soon arose from dubious members of the EarthBound fan community, initially positing alternative theories as to how the cartridge surfaced; they later came to regard the prototype as real, mainly due to Phil Sandhop confirming the cartridge's likely authenticity and the changes in Earth Bound being present in Mother 1+2. The prototype was later sold by Brooks for $1000 to a collector named Andrew DeRouin, who gave it to a friend that kept it for fourteen years; DeRouin would reacquire the cartridge from the friend for free. The cartridge, dubbed the "TK-69" prototype, was dumped once again in 2020, as Demiforce's original back-up had gone missing since its initial release. Since the discovery of the "TK-69" cartridge, multiple prototype cartridges have surfaced outside of Nintendo, with one confirmed prototype residing within the headquarters of Nintendo of America.

Mother 1+2
In 2003, as part of a promotion for Mother 3, Nintendo released a Game Boy Advance compilation titled Mother 1+2, which compiled Mother and its sequel, Mother 2, into one combined cartridge presented only in Japanese. As part of its conversion to a handheld format, Mother received numerous changes to its interface, graphical display, and soundtrack, which were all either compressed or altered to fit within the confines of the Game Boy Advance. Additionally, the game retained many of the changes present in the unreleased English version of Mother, including its altered enemy sprite and extended ending. Commenting on the changes to the Famicom original, Phil Sandhop stated in an interview with LostLevels.org that it was most likely due to convenience: "In software development, each subsequent version is usually derivative of prior versions. Once the program was changed, they would have continued to use the revised program and plugged in their old text modules." The Game Boy Advance version of Mother also contains its own alterations from the original, including revised text, tile-based movement similar to  Mother 2, and a new item called the "Memory Chip", which can be collected after EVE self-destructs and enables the party to warp back to EVE's remains at any point.

Reception
Mother was the sixth best-selling game of 1989 in Japan, where it sold about 400,000 copies. Mother received a "Silver Hall of Fame" score of 31/40 from Japanese magazine Famitsu. Reviewers noted the game's similarities with the Dragon Quest series and its simultaneous "parody" of the genre's tropes. They thought the game's sequel, EarthBound, to be very similar and a better implementation of Mother gameplay ideas. Critics also disliked the game's high difficulty level and balance issues.

Jeremy Parish of USgamer described the game as a mild-mannered parody ("between satire and pastiche") of the role-playing game genre, specifically the Dragon Quest series. He noted that Mother, like many Japanese role-playing games, emulated the Dragon Quest style: the windowed interface, first-person perspective in combat, and graphics, but differed in its contemporary setting and non-fantasy story. Parish commented that Atlus's 1987 Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei was similarly set in the modern day, though it devolved into science fiction and fantasy in ways Mother did not. He added that the game has "a sense of wonder and magic realism ... in the context of childhood imagination", as Ninten can feel more like someone "pretending" to be a Dragon Quest-style hero than a hero in his own right. Parish said this makes the player wonder which game events are real and which are Ninten's imagination. Parish cited Itoi's interest in entering the games industry to make a "satirical" role-playing game as proof of the genre's swift five-year rise to widespread popularity in Japan.

Cassandra Ramos of RPGamer praised the game's graphics and music, and considered it among the console's best, with "rich, ... nicely detailed" visuals, Peanuts-style characters, and "simple but effective" audio. In contrast, she found the battle sequences aesthetically "pretty bland" and, otherwise, the game's "least interesting" aspect. Overall, she found Mother "surprisingly complex ... for its time", and considered its story superior to (but less "wacky" than) its sequel. She especially recommended the game for EarthBound fans.

Parish credited Itoi for the game's vision and compared his ability and literary interests with American author Garrison Keillor. Parish felt that Itoi's pedigree as a writer and copywriter was well suited for the space-limited, 8-bit role-playing game medium, which privileged Mother ahead of other games written by non-writers. USgamer Parish noted how the game's non-player characters would "contemplate the profound and trivial" instead of reciting the active plot. He added that the game's lack of an official North American release has bolstered the reputation and revere of its immediate sequel.

While Parish said Mother script was "as sharp as EarthBound", he felt that the original's game mechanics did not meet the same level of quality. Mother lacked the "rolling HP counter" and non-random encounters for which later entries in the series were known. Parish also found the game's balance to be uneven, as the statistical character attributes and level of difficulty scaled incorrectly with the game's progression. Rose Colored Gaming, a company that made custom reproductions of the NES cartridge, noted that the Japanese release's was more challenging than the unreleased English localization. RPGamer Ramos similarly found balance issues, with a high number of battles, difficult enemies, reliance on grinding, and some oversized levels. Parish wrote earlier for 1UP.com that in comparison to EarthBound, Mother is "worse in just about every way", a clone where its sequel was "a satirical deconstruction of RPGs". He wrote that the game's historical significance is not for its actual game but for the interest it generated in video game emulation and the preservation of unreleased games.

Legacy
Mother was rereleased in Japan as the single-cartridge Mother 1+2 for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. This version uses the extended ending of the unreleased English prototype, but is only presented in Japanese. Starmen.net hosted a Mother 25th Anniversary Fanfest in 2014 with a livestream of the game and plans for a remixed soundtrack. Later that year, fans released a 25th Anniversary Edition ROM hack that updated the game's graphics, script, and gameplay balance.

On October 19, 2019, a fan-made documentary entitled Mother to Earth was released, developed by a film group known as 54&O Productions. The project was funded by Kickstarter, with 560 backers donating $37,000 to reach the minimum $35,000 needed for the documentary's production. The documentary focuses on the road to Mother's localization and eventual release as EarthBound Beginnings in North America, and includes interviews with key people behind the process, as well as notable figures within the gaming community. Additionally, merchandise and psychical media centered around the documentary is available on the project's website.