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Though it only consists of three games, the Mother series (Earthbound in the west) has left a lasting impression on the hearts and minds of a great many gamers. It also stands as one of the most unique JPRG franchises ever—a one-of-a-kind outlier that took early genre conventions and completely tossed them aside.
And while the Earthbound community may not be the biggest fandom in gaming, it is almost undisputedly the most devoted—almost religiously so. In spite of the fact that the series failed to achieve major critical or commercial success, its influence is something most other games could only dream of attaining.
Who are the Starmen?
Created back in 1999 by Reid Young and Clyde Mandelin (aka “Tomato”), Starmen.Net is the biggest and best-known of the Earthbound fansites (though other sites like Earthbound Central and Mother Forever are also notable). The site is named after the recurring Mother series enemy. In time Starmen.net became a lot more than just a handy database for all things Earthbound. It has organized many fan petitions and campaigns calling for Nintendo to stop neglecting the franchise. While none of these have yet achieved their aim in getting a new entry out of Nintendo, those efforts are collectively the greatest example of gamer activism ever, with some campaigns garnering tens of thousands of supporters.
Later, the site put together the Earthbound Anthology: a 268 page, four DVD love letter to Earthbound. The anthology was also a proposal of sorts: to bring Mother 3 to western audiences with an official English translation. When this failed to come to fruition, Starmen.net took it upon itself to do what Nintendo wouldn’t. Two years after Mother 3’s release, a complete English localization of the game became available thanks to the efforts of Starmen.net and a dozen fan volunteers.
It was a monumental undertaking to translate the game’s roughly 1,000 pages of dialogue. Equally impressive, a full-color 200-page guidebook was released alongside the translation patch. Writing for 1up.com Bob Mackey noted that “no other game in the history of time garnered such a rabid demand for translation.” And on behalf of Starmen.net, Reid Young said that the translation “was as much about the fans as it was about the game.” It stands as one of the most significant video game fan translations ever accomplished.
The Future of Earthbound
If the Earthbound fandom is the most dedicated in all of gaming, then it is also the longest-suffering. The last official release was Mother 3 on the GBA in 2006, and series creator Shigesato Itoi has adamantly stated that he is done with Mother. So then it has been left up to the fandom itself to continue the series, a situation which has produced two separate Mother 4 fan game projects. And while these efforts are admirable, neither has borne fruit after years of development.
Whether or not another Earthbound game ever releases—officially or otherwise—the series’ unique DNA lives on in modern indie games such as Omori, Undertale and Eastward. The marketing tagline for Mother 3, “Strange, funny, heartrending” is the perfect way to summarize the trilogy as a whole. As games that, at their core, are about coming of age and the loss of innocence, and finding meaning in the white void of existence.
How ironic then that in the Earthbound fandom, life imitates art. Its resilience in the face of Nintendo’s long-standing indifference toward the community and its pleas is something to be admired. Its love for these decades-old RPGs is a testament to the fact that sometimes, a video game can be life-changing.
