“What Ever Happened to MOTHER / EarthBound Beginnings?”

MOTHER came out for the Famicom in 1989, two years after I was born. Decades later, as EarthBound Beginnings, it officially released on the Wii U and Switch virtual consoles, and at the prompting of an old friend, two years after becoming a father myself, I finally played it. Anyone interested in video games, relational life-lines, and the vagaries of time and taste should do the same.

To say I’m biased is like saying people in big cities are fond of Strawberry Tofu. I’ve dedicated untold hours to the playful study of the 1994 SNES sequel, EarthBound. Not many players have noted its resonances with Shakespeare and Proust, beyond better-acknowledged references to The Beatles or Kurt Vonnegut. To remedy that, besides publishing podcasts and essays online, I teach a Video Game Studies class around EarthBound Beginnings at the public high school where I work. Inviting more people to engage critically with games, trying together to explain the hold games have on us, is my Trout-flavored Yogurt. 

Playing and talking about games has been a bright point of connection for many people amid the wrack and ruin of the present. If I can point a few more toward the promise of games to enrich lives, over against the charges of games’ alleged noxious impacts, I’ll try. So much for my professional and personal indebtedness to the gift that is the MOTHER series. Hence the significance of finally playing the original. Before recounting what I learned, though, I have a further confession. 

Forgive me, MOTHER

Technically, this was my second play-through. MOTHER was localized and set for US release in 1989, but factors such as timing–the impending release of the SNES made the NES something of a lame duck–and cost–the disappointing reception of JRPGs like Dragon Warrior abroad, compared with their smashing success in Japan–convinced Nintendo not to ship the game. Nevertheless, an unreleased cartridge found its way into the world. ROM dumps and hacks made it possible for anyone to download the game. (See starmen.net for the whole convoluted history.) In the mid aughts, I sheepishly emulated a bootleg version, dubbed EarthBound Zero. 

I was chiefly interested in Zero and the MOTHER 3 fan translation for light they might shed on EB, not in their own right as games or cultural artifacts. But this cavalier attitude is not the worst of it. Playing legitimately on the Wii U at last, I brought much more patience and care to playing through Beginnings . I hardly remembered it at all, so quickly had I rushed through it before. But even with the distance between EB and its predecessor established firmly in mind, even taking into account the constraints on each, I still fell short of my goal to fully take the measure of the game. After reaching the final area, Mt Itoi, I gave up and watched a video of the rest, including the ending.

We learn by failing. I learned about my laziness, or my resourcefulness, in seeking an alternative to hours of grinding. Like any challenging work of art, video games stand to teach us first of all about ourselves–our limits–to the extent that we have patience for reflection, stomach for self-knowledge. I can live with exploring imagined worlds but not exhausting all that a game has to offer. Like you, if you’re reading this before playing EarthBound Beginnings, I can avail myself of the experiences of others.  

Still, many of us are better off playing games, like reading books, firsthand. Even if we don’t feel able to comprehend them–especially then–we need to do the work of trying. Better yet if we strive in collaboration with others. They help us see, besides self-knowledge, our takeaways are two-fold: about the work itself, the internal elements structuring it and the external factors shaping it; but also about other people. The relationships we form learning together have intrinsic worth. I played this game with a friend, and it brought us cheer and solace in our hectic lives. The most remarkable aspect of Beginnings we observed is the peculiar history of its progenitor, Shigesato Itoi, and the ways he inscribes himself into his game. 

The Dad, the Adman

By the late 80’s, Itoi was well established as a copywriter. Like the “billboard guy” up the hill from Ness, he created advertising slogans. (The irony of “this game stinks,” then, reeks to high heaven). Itoi kept a scroll painted by Woody Allen for his iconic “delicious life” ad campaign, evocative of the way in which reality absconds behind a cliché, redolent of the whole “floating world” immortalized in Lost in Translation. Parlaying his fame further into the heart of the zeitgeist, around the time MOTHER released, Itoi voiced the father in My Neighbor Totoro. Maybe the role brought themes of nature and loss to the forefront of Itoi’s thoughts. In a much later 2011 interview in Brutus, translated on EB Central, he calls the MOTHER games “a letter to my own daughter who I couldn’t see for a while due to divorce issues.” 

Shigesato Itoi in front of a scroll that reads Oishii seikatsu (“Delicious life”). SATOKO KAWASAKI (Japan Times, via wayback machine)

His taglines grace many films, but Itoi’s forays into show business hardly stop there. A smattering of highlights from MOTHER 3 fan-translator Clyde Mandelin’s Legends of Localization:  

– Composing lyrics for hit musicians 

– Holding annual fishing tournaments with popular comedians

– Searching for legendary lost gold on national television

Mandelin remarks, “Shigesato Itoi has the knack for seeing things in interesting new ways, so it’s no wonder that his game-related side projects were filled with unique inventiveness, too.” (p. 50)

Before we turn to the genesis of those “game-related side projects,” consider one more cinematic example. With MOTHER 3 finally finished after a harrowing development, our consummate cosmopolitan made a cameo as a professor in the 2010 Norwegian Wood (based on the novel by Haruki Murakami). Interrupted in his lecture on Andromache by student protestors–Itoi participated in the protest movement himself before dropping out to write copy–the professor sardonically replies, “I can’t imagine anything is more profound than Greek tragedy.” A pat line deflating the self-importance of rebellious youths; a claim, too, about the primacy of art and the life of the mind. Aside from political or other considerations, art transcends its particular time and applies equally to all. Itoi’s delivery is particularly striking in light of the machinations of fate and deus ex machina in each of his games. Still, it’s a magnificently cheeky claim coming from Itoi, a mercenary master of the marketplace as well as a poetic wordsmith of the highest order. 

Ave Maria

As early as 1989 (in a GSLA interview translated on shmuplations), Itoi described his initial pitch for the game that would become MOTHER. It was no home run. 

We talked and Miyamoto agreed to meet with me. But since I was an amateur and didn’t really know what I was doing, when I showed him my plans and was like, “This part is cool right here,” he didn’t seem at all impressed. […] Even now, I think there was a perception of the project like, “Itoi thinks he can just come in here and make a quick buck with a game, eh…” 

Like any good fisherman-raconteur, he expands on the story in subsequent tellings.

I pictured them jumping up from their chairs, saying, “Wow, what an idea! We must try it!” It was a dream of mine that they’d make a game using that idea, but instead the conversation just kind of stopped at Miyamoto asking me how serious I was about it. He said, “Itoi, how involved do you plan on being in it? Being totally involved in a project can be very demanding.” (Game Center CX 2019, translation on siliconera)

In the later interview, Itoi emphasizes his sense of “indebtedness” to Nintendo, and particularly to Shigeru Miyamoto. Asthma kept him up at night, and Itoi coped by playing Super Mario Bros. Despite the hint of PSI powers in the game’s backstory, there is something unassuming about Beginnings and its hero, comically named Ninten by default. The modern-day setting and seemingly ordinary household are shaken, literally, when poltergeist activity wakes him from his sleep at the start of the game. Reinforcing Itoi’s impulse to pay homage to Nintendo in the person of his hero, Ninten’s unique status ailment is asthma. 

If that opening hooks the player, as Itoi’s bona fides evidently did end up satisfying Miyamoto, we’ll continue finding more self-insertions as we play. Defending our home from possessed lamps and naked dolls, rescuing our neighbors from zombies and zoo animals, we gain a clear direction only in the dreamlike world of Magicant. Ruled by Queen Mary, accessible thanks to the Great-Grandfather’s diary, Magicant is where Ninten learns that saving the world entails recovering segments of a song the Queen used to sing before she forgot who she was. These Eight Melodies point towards the perennial, intertwined importance of music and memory in Itoi’s games. As he puts it, apropos of the John Lennon song “Mother”: 

His voice made tears gush out… I decided to make others feel the same way. 

Along with the absence of Ninten’s father, whose voice on the phone functions as the game’s save feature, this yearning for the mother who stays home while our hero goes off on his adventures has such wide application as to be effectively universal. Only as a parent, playing Beginnings now, did I feel the flip-side of this absence. Because just like the hero, the father is away from home, too. His absence is never explained. Presumably he has work of a more quotidian nature than saving the planet, just like Itoi. Saving the game, his voice functions as the reminder of real life outside of it, the wider world of play and responsibility. 

There are many Itoi sightings in EarthBound Beginnings, from Easter eggs (a landmine hidden in the desert) to Rorschach tests (“Are you a forgotten man, too?”). The guitar-playing hermit in Magicant advises us to write it all down. If only some enterprising copywriter sold day-planner-journals and similar merchandise through his website… To take one last example: the location late in the game outright called Mt Itoi, where I got stuck. It might have broke me, once. Now, though, with the gray in my hair and the sunshine on my kid’s, I don’t mind so much. I love that my friend pointed out how, if you step back to look at the map, Mt Itoi looks like a person: 

Maybe you have to use your imagination, but there’s a heart-shaped torso, a strong left shoulder, and an unmistakable face. A frank brow, a friendly nose. We don’t see Ninten’s dad’s face when he appears right at the end of the credits wearing an overcoat and holding a briefcase, making a call home from a payphone downtown. But if this, too, is Itoi, he looks like he could be smiling and shedding tears.

Wesley Schantz coordinates the Video Game Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA.