Now a big fan of the game, he first found out about EarthBound via emulation.

“I remember seeing all the big names on the top-rated list, such as Super Mario World and Zelda, and recognizing most of them except for EarthBound,” one Redditor, stfnotguilty, told me. Fans who wanted to play the game without paying through the nose for old, Super NES retail copies had only one choice: bending the law. Yet it was emulation - a tool famously abhorred by Nintendo - that helped EarthBound clinch its cult status. The fans even took it upon themselves to painstakingly put together a translation of Mother 3, the long-awaited 2006 follow-up to Mother and EarthBound, when Nintendo kept it exclusive to the Japanese market. To show their love, the team at created a 270-page EarthBound artbook, and fans carried out letter and phone campaigns to get a North American release of the Mother 1 + 2 compilation on the Game Boy Advance, albeit with little success. Many fans have spent decades clamoring for Nintendo to do more with the series, which consists of just three games released over more than a decade. Undertale is probably the best-known example of this genre, and it owes much of its goofy yet lovable tone to EarthBound.ĮarthBound enjoys a dedicated fan base of North American and European players who revere it as a classic in the JRPG genre. It’s part of a series known as Mother in Japan, but it’s EarthBound that has left its fingerprints all over a growing genre of games colloquially known as Motherlikes in some communities. EarthBound, the endearing Japanese role-playing game from the Super Nintendo era, delivers a very particular brand of surreal humor and sentimentality.

Undertale emulator online