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EarthBound, known as Mother 2 in Japan, is a 1994 Japanese role-playing video game co-developed by Ape and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System video game console. As Ness and his party of four, the player travels the world to collect melodies en route to defeating the evil alien force Giygas. The game is set in a satirical, contemporary United States and is known for its unconventional humor. It is the second game of the Mother series, and the only one to be released in the English language. EarthBound was released in Japan on August 27, 1994, and in North America on June 5, 1995.

The game was developed over five years, written by Japanese author Shigesato Itoi, and produced by future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. It was originally intended and near release for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Itoi wanted the game to reach non-gamers with its intentionally goofy personality. Its unique rolling hit points meter was based on pachinko balls before its odometer form. Marcus Lindblom at Nintendo of America handled the game's localization into English. The game's expensive "this game stinks" marketing campaign was based on crude humor.

EarthBound received a poor critical response and sold poorly in the United States, around half as many copies as in Japan. Critics credit this to a combination of the game's simple graphics, the marketing campaign, and a lack of market interest in the genre. Reviewers praised its real world setting, and retrospective reviewers came to praise the game. Many consider the game a classic or all-time favorite. Critics concluded that the game had aged well. The game spawned a dedicated fan community that advocated for the series. EarthBound was rereleased for the Wii U Virtual Console in 2013 following many years of fan lobbying. Ness became a featured character in each of the Super Smash Bros. series games. A final sequel, Mother 3, was planned, stalled, and finally released for the Game Boy Advance in 2006.

Gameplay
EarthBound plays as a Japanese role-playing game modeled on Dragon Quest where "exploration leads to battles leads to exposition". The game is characterized by its contemporary, satirical Western world setting and its unconventional characters, enemies, and humor. Unlike traditional role-playing games, EarthBound American setting is marked by baseball bats and caps instead of swords and armor, by cookies and hamburgers instead of potions, and by policemen instead of monsters. Instead of knights and goblins, players fight aliens, vomit piles, and "possessed hippies" in cult colonies, video game arcades, and other dimensions. The player walks about maps, talks to people, buys items, and fights enemies. The player's goal is to collect "magical melodies" across the world in order to defeat an alien evil.

Players enter battle sequences upon touching on-screen enemies. Players can avoid touching enemies to avoid battles, and likewise, underpowered enemies will try to avoid the player. EarthBound battle sequences have psychedelic backgrounds and few character animations. Each character attacks one turn at a time. The game has a "rolling HP meter", where a character's hit points gradually roll down when hurt. The character can be saved from dying if the player is faster than the roll. As standard for Japanese role-playing games, Ness equips weapons, which he uses alongside psychic abilities in turn-based combat. Certain enemies are more vulnerable to specific types of attacks, which informs the player's strategy. Accordingly, the player must monitor their party's remaining health, items, and psychic points.

Examples of the game's humor include untraditional enemies such as "New Age Retro Hippie" and "Unassuming Local Guy", snide dialogue, frequent puns, and fourth wall-breaking. The game also plays self-aware pranks on the player, such as the existence of the useless ruler and protractor items that players and enemies can unsuccessfully try to use nonetheless.

The game is about 30 hours in duration.

Plot
The player starts as a young boy named Ness as he investigates a nearby meteorite crash with his neighbor, Pokey. He finds that an alien force, Giygas, has enveloped the world in hatred and consequently turned animals, humans, and objects into malicious creatures. A bee from the future instructs Ness to collect melodies in a Sound Stone to preemptively stop the force. While visiting these eight Sanctuaries, Ness meets three other kids named Paula, Jeff, and Poo—"a psychic girl, an eccentric inventor, and a ponytailed martial artist", respectively —who join his party. Along the way, Ness visits the cultists of Happy Happy Village (where he meets Paula) and the zombie-infested Threed, where they fall prey to a trap. Paula prays to Jeff in a Winters boarding school to rescue her and Ness. They continue to Fourside and its neon flipside, Moonside. Poo, the prince of Dalaam, partakes in a violent meditation called "Mu Training" before joining the party. When the Sound Stone is filled, Ness visits Magicant alone, a surreal location in his mind where he fights his dark side. Upon returning to Eagleland, he prepares to travel back in time to fight a young Giygas, a battle known for its "feeling of isolation, ... incomprehensible attacks, ... buzzing static" and reliance on prayer.

Development
The first Mother was released for the NES in 1989. Its sequel, Mother 2, or EarthBound, was developed over five years by Ape (later Creatures ) and HAL, and published through Nintendo. The game was written and designed by Japanese author, musician, and advertiser Shigesato Itoi, and produced by Satoru Iwata, who became Nintendo's president and CEO. Mother 2 was made with a development team different from that of the original game, and most of its members were unmarried and willing to work all night on the project. Mother 2 development took much longer than planned and came under repeated threat of cancellation. Itoi has said that the project's dire straits were resolved when Iwata joined the team. Ape's programming team had more members than HAL on the project. The HAL team (led by lead programmer Iwata) worked on the game programming, while the Ape team (led by lead programmer Kouji Malta) worked on specific data, such as the text and maps. They spent biweekly retreats together at the HAL office in view of Mount Fuji.

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The game was originally intended for release on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1992, where a version of the game was produced, translated, and "basically done", such that Nintendo Power published some of its screenshots. Due to the prototype's expected release late in the NES product cycle, the NES version was scrapped for a release on its successor, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). The game was designed to fit within an eight megabit limit, but was expanded in size and scope twice: first to 12 megabits and second to 24 megabits.

The game continues Mother story in that Giygas reappears as the antagonist (and thus did not die at the end of Mother) and the player has the option of choosing whether to continue the protagonist's story by choosing whether to name their player-character the same as the original. He considered interstellar and interplanetary space travel instead of the confines of a single planet in the new game. After four months, Itoi scrapped the idea as cliché. Itoi sought to make a game that would appeal to populations that were playing games less, such as girls.

The Mother series titles are built on what Itoi considered "reckless wildness", where he would offer ideas that encouraged his staff to contribute new ways of portraying scenes in the video game medium. He saw the titles foremost as games and not "big scenario scripts". Itoi has said that he wanted the player feel emotions such as "distraught" when playing the game. The game's writing was intentionally "quirky and goofy" in character, and written in the Japanese kana script so as to give dialogue a conversational feel. Itoi thought of the default player-character names when he did not like his team's suggestions. Many of the characters were based on real life personalities. For instance, the desert miners were modeled on specific executives from a Japanese construction company. The final battle dialogue with Giygas was based on Itoi's recollections of a traumatic scene from the Shintoho film The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty that he had accidentally seen in his childhood. Itoi referred to the battle background animations as a "video drug". The same specialist made nearly 200 of these animations, working solely on backgrounds for two years.

The idea for the rolling HP meter began with pachinko balls that would drop balls off the screen upon being hit. This did not work as well for characters with high health. Instead, around 1990, they chose a odometer-style hit points counter. The bicycle was one of the harder elements to implement —it used controls similar to a tank before it was tweaked. Iwata felt that the Ape programmers were particularly willing to tackle such challenges. The programmers also found difficulty implementing the in-game delivery service, where the delivery person had to navigate around obstacles to reach the player. They thought it would be funny to have the delivery person run through obstacles in a hurry on his way off-screen. The unusual maps laid out with diagonal streets in oblique projection required extra attention from the artists. Itoi specifically chose against having an overworld map, and didn't want to artificially distinguish between towns and other areas. Instead, he worked to make each town unique. His own favorite town was Threed, though it was Summers before then.

The game was originally scheduled for release in January 1993 on a 12 megabit cartridge. It was finished around May 1994 and the Japanese release was set for August 27, 1994. With the extra few months, the team played the game and added small, personal touches. Itoi told Weekly Famitsu that Shigeru Miyamoto liked the game and that it was the first role-playing game that Miyamoto had completed. Mother 2 would release in North America about a year later.

North American release
As traditional for Nintendo, Mother 2 was developed in Japan and localized in the United States, a process in which the game is translated into English for Western audiences. As the only game in the Mother series to be released in North America, its Mother 2 title was changed to EarthBound to avoid confusion about the other entries in the series.

Nintendo of America's Dan Owsen began the English localization project and converted about ten percent of the script before moving to another project. Marcus Lindblom filled Owsen's position around January 1995. He had previously worked in Nintendo of America's call center and on Wario's Woods. Lindblom credits Owsen with coining some of the game's "most iconic phrases", such as "say fuzzy pickles". Lindblom was given liberties to make the script "as weird as [he] wanted", as Nintendo wanted the script to be more American than a direct translation. He worked alone, with great latitude, and in direct contact with the headquarters. He was aided by Japanese writer Masayuki Miura, who translated the Japanese script and contextualized its tone, which Lindblom described as "a glass half full".

Lindblom was challenged by the task of culturally translating "an outsider's view of the U.S." for an American audience. He also sought to stay true to the original text, though he never met or spoke with Itoi. In addition to reworking the original puns and humor, Lindblom added private jokes and American cultural allusions to Bugs Bunny, comedian Benny Hill, and This Is Spinal Tap. Apart from the dialogue, he wrote the rest of the game's text, including combat prompts and item names. As one of several Easter eggs, he named a non-player character for his daughter, Nico, who was born during development. While Lindblom took the day off for her birth, he proceeded to work 14-hour days without weekends for the next month. The game also includes protection against piracy that, when triggered, increases enemy counts to make the game less enjoyable. Additionally, right before players reach the end of the pirated copy's story, their game resets and deletes its saved file in an act that IGN declared "arguably the most devious and notorious example of 'creative' copy protection".

Under directives from Nintendo, he worked with the Japanese artists and programmers to remove references to intellectual property, religion, and alcohol from the American release, such as a truck's Coca-Cola logo, the red crosses on hospitals, and crosses on tombstones. Alcohol became coffee, Ness was no longer nude in the Magicant area, and the Happy Happyist blue cultists were made to look less like Ku Klux Klansmen. The team was not concerned with music licensing issues and considered itself somewhat protected under the guise of parody. Lindblom recalled that the music did not need many changes. The graphical fixes were not finished until March 1995, and the game was not fully playable until May. EarthBound was released on June 5, 1995 in North America.

Though Nintendo spent about $2 million on marketing, the American release was ultimately viewed as unsuccessful within Nintendo. The game's atypical marketing campaign was derived from the game's unusual humor. As part of Nintendo's larger "Play It Loud" campaign, EarthBound "this game stinks" campaign included foul-smelling scratch and sniff advertisements. 1UP.com called the scratch and sniff advertising campaign "infamously ill-conceived", and Digital Trends described the campaign as "bizarre" and "based around fart jokes". The campaign was also expensive. It emphasized magazine advertisements and had the extra cost of the strategy guide included with each game. Aaron Linde of Shacknews wrote that the price of the packaged game curtailed sales. Between the poor sales and the phasing out of the Super Nintendo, the game did not receive a European release.

Lindblom and his team were devastated by the release's poor critical response and sales. He recalled that the game was hurt by reception of its graphics as "simplistic" at a time when critics placed high importance on graphics quality. Lindblom felt that the game's changes to the RPG formula (e.g., the rolling HP meter and fleeing enemies) were ignored in the following years, though he thought game had aged well at the time of its Virtual Console rerelease in 2013.

Audio
Mother composers Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka returned to compose the EarthBound soundtrack with Hiroshi Kanazu. The transition to a new console afforded the team greater creative freedoms. While the sound technology in the first game's console was limited to three simultaneous notes, the Super Nintendo supported up to eight. As a result, the team could write compositions closer in complexity to their normal compositional style, with higher sound quality. Suzuki would first write songs with a synthesizer before working with programmers to move them into the game. His personal tracks play when the player is walking about the map, out of battle. Suzuki's favorite piece is the music that plays while the player is on a bicycle, which he composed in advance of this job but found appropriate to include. He wrote over 100 pieces, but much of it was not included in the game. The team wrote enough music as to fill eight megabits of the 24 megabit cartridge—about two compact discs.

Suzuki cited John Lennon as a strong influence due to the common theme of love in his music, which was also a prominent theme in the game. The soundtrack was released by Sony Records on November 2, 1994, and was later reprinted by Sony Music Direct on February 18, 2004.

The game uses audio samples and borrows from sources including The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again", Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, Bimbo Jet, Ric Ocasek's "This Side of Paradise", the Dallas String Band, "The Liberty Bell", "The Star-Spangled Banner", the Our Gang theme, "Tequila", The Doors's "The Changeling", and "Johnny B. Goode". Other influences include A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, Frank Zappa's Make a Jazz Noise Here, Hal Willner's Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films, Michael Nyman, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, and Wired Presents: Music Futurists.

Reception
The game originally received little critical praise from the American press, and sold poorly in the United States:   around 140,000 copies, as compared to twice as many in Japan. Kotaku described EarthBound 1995 American release as "a dud" and blamed the low sales on "a bizarre marketing campaign" and graphics "cartoonish" beyond the average taste of players. The game was released when RPGs were not popular in the United States, and visual taste in RPGs was closer to Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. The game was especially expensive due to the included strategy guide. While the game piggybacked on Itoi's celebrity in Japan, it became a "curio" for European audiences.

Multiple reviewers described the game as "original" or "unique" and praised its script's range of emotions  and humor. IGN's Scott Thompson said the game teetered between solemn and audacious in its dialogue and gameplay, and noted its deviance from RPG tropes in aspects such as choice of attacks in battle. He found the game both "bizarre and memorable". Official Nintendo Magazine Simon Parkin thought the game's script was its best asset, as "one of the medium's strongest and idiosyncratic storylines" that fluctuated "between humorous and poignant". GameZone David Sanchez thought its script was "clever" and "sharp", as it displayed a wide range of emotions that made him want to talk to all non-player characters. GamesTM wrote that the game designers spoke with their players through the non-playable characters, and noted how Itoi's interests shaped the script, its allusions to popular culture, and its "strangely existential narrative framework".

Critics praised its "real world" setting, which was seen as an uncommon choice. IGN's Thompson noted its 1990s homage as "a love letter to 20th-century Americana", with a payphone as a save point, ATMs to transfer money, yo-yos as weapons, skateboarders and hippies as enemies, and references to classic rock bands. Official Nintendo Magazine Parkin noted the theme's distance from the "knights and dragons" common to the Japanese role-playing game genre. Reviewers noted the game's steep difficulty. IGN's Thompson wrote that the beginning was the hardest, and that aspects such as limited inventory, experience grinds, and monetary penalties upon death were unfriendly for players new to Japanese RPGs. He also cited the quick respawn time for foes and ultimate need to not avoid battles given the difficulty of bosses.

Reviewers described the game's ambiance as cheery and full of charm. David Sanchez of GameZone thought the game's self-awareness added to its charm, where the player learned through the game's poking lighthearted fun. He added that the music was an "absolute delight" and complimented its range from space sounds to themes to "bizarre" battle tracks that varied with the enemy type. GamesTM wrote that the game's reputation comes from the "consistent ... visual language" in its Charles M. Schulz-esque character and world design. Kotaku Jason Schreier found the ending unsatisfying and unrelieving, despite finding the ending credits with its character curtain call and photo album of "fuzzy pickles" moments all "wonderful.

Of the original reviewers, Nicholas Dean Des Barres of DieHard GameFan wrote that EarthBound was not as impressive as Final Fantasy III, although just as fun. He praised the game's humor and wrote that the game completely defied his first impressions. Des Barres wrote that "past the graphics", which were purposefully 8-bit for nostalgia, the game is not an "entry level" or a "child's" RPG, but "highly intelligent" and "captivating". The Brazilian Super GamePower explained that those expecting a Dungeons and Dragons-style RPG will be disappointed by the childish visuals, which were unlike other 16-bit games. They wrote that the American humor was too mature and that the gameplay was too immature, as if for beginners.

Reviewing the game years after its release, IGN's Scott Thompson wrote that EarthBound balances "dark Lovecraftian apocalypse and silly lightheartedness", and was just as interesting nearly a decade after its original release. While he lamented a lack of "visual feedback" in battle animations, he felt the game had innovations that still feel "smart and unique": the rolling HP meter and lack of random battles. Thompson also noted that technical issues like animation slowdown with multiple enemies on-screen went unfixed in the rerelease. Official Nintendo Magazine Parkin found the game to provide a more potent experience than developers with more resources and thought its battle sequences were "sleek". Nintendo World Report Justin Baker was surprised by the "excellent" battle system and controls, which he found to be underreported in other reviews despite their streamlined, grind-reducing convenience. He wrote that some of the menu interactions were clunky. GamesTM felt that the game was "far from revolutionary", compared to Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, and that its battle scenes were unexciting. The magazine compared the game's "chosen one" story to a "throwaway Link's Awakening/Goonies hybrid narrative". Reviewers praised Nintendo for digitizing the Player's Guide, though IGN noted that it was technically easier to view it on another tablet rather than switching the Wii U's view mode. Multiple reviewers concluded that the game had aged well.

Legacy
Since its release, the game's English localization has found praise. Localization reviewer Clyde Mandelin described the Japanese-to-English conversion as "top-notch for its time". Kotaku found the localization "funny, clever, and evocative", and 1UP.com said it was "unusually excellent" for the time. IGN wrote that Nintendo was "dead wrong" for believing that Americans would not be interested in "such a chaotic and satirical world". Critics consider the game one of the weirdest and most surreal role-playing games. Examples include using items such as the Pencil Eraser to remove pencil statues, experiencing in-game hallucinations, meeting "a man who turned himself into a dungeon", and battling piles of vomit, taxi cabs, and walking nooses.

EarthBound was listed in 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die, where Christian Donlan wrote that the game is "name-checked by the video gaming cognoscenti more often than it's actually been played". Similarly, Eurogamer Simon Parkin described it as a "sacred cow amongst gaming's cognoscenti". Donlan called the game "utterly brilliant" and praised its overworld and battle system. Kotaku described aspects of the game's story, such as the "Mr. Saturn coffee break", as "poignant". Jeremy Parish of USgamer called EarthBound "the all-time champion" of self-aware games that "warp ... perceptions and boundaries" and break the fourth wall, citing its frequent internal commentary about the medium and the final scenes where the player is directly addressed by the game. He thought the final scene was "perhaps the most clever and powerful moment in a clever and powerful game". David Sanchez of GameZone wrote that EarthBound "went places no other game would" in the 1990s or even in the present day, including "trolling" the player "before trolling was cool". Author Hiromi Kawakami told Itoi that she had played the game "about 80 times". GamesTM said the game felt fresh because of its reliance on "personal experiences" made it "exactly the sort of title that would thrive today as an indie hit". He called this accomplishment "remarkable" and credited Nintendo's commitment to the "voices of creators". IGN's Nadia Oxford said that nearly two decades since the release, its final boss fight against Giygas continues to be "one of the most epic video game standoffs of all time" and noted its emotional impact. Kotaku wrote that the game was content to make the player "feel lonely", and, overall, was special not for any individual aspect but for its method of using the video game medium to explore ideas impossible to explore in other media.

Critics consider EarthBound a "classic" or "must-play" video game, even in the United Kingdom, where the title was only available via import. Game journalists have ranked EarthBound among the best Super Nintendo games and most essential Japanese role-playing games, and multiple reader polls ranked the game among the best of all time. IGN rated EarthBound setting among the best in the medium, indelible between its unconventional environments, 1960s music, and portrayal of Americanism. It "would be a great disservice", GameZone said, to merely call EarthBound "a gem".

Several critics referred to the game as among their all-time favorites. EarthBound was cited as an official influence on video games including Costume Quest, South Park: The Stick of Truth (via series creator Trey Parker), and Undertale. Additionally, EarthBound was reported as an unofficial influence on Contact. The few role-playing games set in real world (non-fantasy) settings, PC Gamer has written, are often and accurately described as having been influenced by EarthBound.

Fandom
EarthBound is known for having a cult following, which developed over time well after its release. Colin Campbell of Polygon wrote that "few gaming communities are as passionate and active" as EarthBound, and 1UP.com Bob Mackey wrote that no game was as poised to have a cult following. IGN's Lucas M. Thomas wrote in 2006 that EarthBound "persistent", "ambitious", and "religiously dedicated collective of hardcore fans" would be among the first groups to influence Nintendo's decision-making through their purchasing power on Virtual Console. Digital Trends's Anthony John Agnello wrote that "no video game fans have suffered as much as EarthBound fans", and cited Nintendo's reluctance to release Mother series games in North America. IGN described the series as neglected by Nintendo in North America for similar reasons. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata later credited the community response on their online Miiverse social platform as leading to EarthBound eventual rerelease on their Virtual Console platform. Physical copies of EarthBound were hard to find before the rerelease, and in 2013, were worth twice its initial retail price.

Wired described the amount of EarthBound "fan art, videos, and tributes on fan sites like EarthBound Central or Starmen.net" as mountainous. Reid Young of Starmen.net and Fangamer credits EarthBound popularity to its "labor of love" nature, with a "double-coat of thoughtfulness and care" across all aspects of the game by a development team that appeared to love their work. Young started the fansite that would become Starmen.net in 1997 while in middle school. It became "the definitive fan community for EarthBound on the web" and had "almost inexplicable" growth. Shacknews described the site's collection of fan-made media as "absolutely massive". It also provided a place to aggregate information on the Mother series and to coordinate fan actions.

The EarthBound fan community at Starmen.net coalesced with the intent to have Nintendo of America acknowledge the Mother series. The community drafted several thousand-person petitions for specific English-language Mother series releases, but in time, their request shifted to no demand at all, wanting only their interest to be recognized by Nintendo. A 2007 campaign for a Mother 3 English localization led to the creation of a full-color, 270-page art book—The EarthBound Anthology—sent to Nintendo and press outlets as demonstration of consumer interest. Shacknews called it more of a proposal than a collection of fan art, and "the greatest gaming love letter ever created". Upon "little" response from Nintendo, they decided to localize the game themselves. Starmen.net co-founder and professional game translator Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin led the project from its November 2006 announcement to October 2008 finish. They then printed a "professional quality strategy guide" through Fangamer, a video game merchandising site that spun off from Starmen.net. The Verge cited the effort as proof of the fan base's dedication.

Other fan efforts include EarthBound, USA, a full-length documentary on Starmen.net and the fan community, and Mother 4, a fan-produced sequel to the Mother series that went into production when Itoi definitively "declared" that he was done with the series. After following the fan community from afar, Lindblom came out to fans in mid-2012 and the press became interested in his work. He had planned a book about the game's development, release, and fandom before a reply from Nintendo discouraged him from pursuing the idea. He plans to continue to communicate directly with the community about the game's history.

Ness
EarthBound Ness became widely known from his later appearance as an ensemble cast member in the Super Smash Bros. fighting game series, including the original Super Smash Bros. (1991) and its sequels: Melee (2001), Brawl (2008), and 3DS/Wii U (2014). Ness's inclusion in the original release was among its biggest surprises, and renewed Mother series fans' faith in new content from Nintendo. Ness was one of the game's most powerful characters, according to IGN, if players could perfect his odd controls and psychic powers. In Europe, which did not see an EarthBound release, Ness was better known for his role in the fighting game than for his original role in the role-playing game.

Ness returned in the first sequel, Melee, alongside an EarthBound-themed item and battle arena. Lucas of Mother 3 joined Ness in Brawl. Several years after Brawl release, Official Nintendo Magazine wrote that Ness was an unpopular Smash character who should be removed from future installments. Ness, however, returned in the fourth Smash game, 3DS/Wii U, and Lucas was later added as downloadable content. Nintendo also produced Ness and Lucas Amiibo figurines.

Sequels and rerelease
Nintendo announced a sequel to EarthBound for the Nintendo 64 in 1996: Mother 3 (EarthBound 64 in North America). It was scheduled for release on the 64DD, a Nintendo 64 expansion peripheral that used a magneto-optical drive, but struggled to find a firm release date as its protracted development entered development hell. It was later canceled altogether in 2000 when the 64DD flopped.

In April 2003, a Japanese television advertisement revealed that both Mother 3 and a combined Mother 1+2 cartridge were in development for the handheld Game Boy Advance. Mother 3 abandoned the Nintendo 64 version's 3D, but kept its plot. It became a bestseller upon its Japanese release in 2006, yet did not receive a North American release on the basis that it would not sell. Around Mother 3 2006 release, Itoi stated that he had no plans to make Mother 4, which he has reaffirmed repeatedly. IGN described the series as neglected by Nintendo in North America, as Mother 1, Mother 1+2 and Mother 3 were not released outside Japan. Despite this, Ness's recurrence in the Super Smash Bros. series signaled favorable odds for the future of the Mother series.

When Nintendo launched its digital distribution platform, Virtual Console, for the Wii in 2006, IGN expected EarthBound to be among Nintendo's highest priorities for rerelease, given the "religious" dedication of its fanbase. Though the game was ranked the most desired Virtual Console release by Nintendo Power readers, rated for release by the ESRB, and able to be published with little effort, the Wii version did not materialize. Fans commonly believed that music licensing or legal concerns secretly impeded the rerelease. (Nintendo later confirmed that the music licenses were not a factor in the rerelease.) English localizer Marcus Lindblom instead hypothesized that Nintendo did not realize the magnitude of the game's popular support and did not consider it a priority project. By 2008, Nintendo of America appeared to show little care for a rerelease.

At the end of 2012, Itoi announced that the rerelease was moving forward, which a January 2013 Nintendo Direct presentation confirmed. As part of anniversary celebrations for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Mother 2 in March 2013, Nintendo rereleased EarthBound for Japan on the Wii's successor, the Wii U Virtual Console. EarthBound producer Satoru Iwata, now Nintendo's president, soon announced a wider rerelease, citing fan interest on Nintendo's Miiverse social platform. The July 2013 American and European launch included a free, online recreation of the game's original Player's Guide, optimized for viewing on the Wii U Gamepad. The game was a top-seller on the Wii U Virtual Console, and both Kotaku users and first-time EarthBound players had an "overwhelmingly positive" response to the game. Simon Parkin wrote that its rerelease was a "momentous occasion" as the return of "one of Nintendo's few remaining lost classics" after 20 years. The rerelease was one GameSpot editor's game of the year, and Nintendo Life Virtual Console game of the year. The New Nintendo 3DS-specific Virtual Console received the rerelease the next year, in March 2016.

EarthBound is one of the compilation titles scheduled for release in Nintendo's Super Nintendo Classic Edition revival microconsole, due in September 2017. Japan's version of the console, however, will not include Mother 2, to the chagrin of the series' Japanese followers.