EarthBound Beginnings

EarthBound Beginnings 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, animate objects and vehicles, extraterrestrial life, robots and mind-controlled humans and 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. Lloyd and the game's fourth party member, Teddy, lack inherent psychic powers, unlike Ninten and Ana.

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 an odd 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 America. Starting off by resolving some in his hometown of Mother's Day, Ninten warps to the land of Magicant, where its monarch, Queen Mary, asks Ninten to collect the eight melodies 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.

EarthBound Beginnings was developed by Ape and published by Nintendo. In 1987, copywriter Shigesato Itoi became interested in role-playing games after a colleague of his introduced him to the Dragon Quest series. While playing Dragon Quest II on his Famicom, Itoi conceived of a role-playing game set in contemporary times, as he did not have much knowledge of medieval times (which the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series were based on) and found the former setting to be more interesting. Having no prior experience in the gaming industry, Itoi hoped a company would produce his idea for him; after he publicly defended video games on a late-night talk show, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi became interested in his work and ordered project manager Yoshio Sakamoto to invite Itoi to work on advertising for Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School for the Famicom Disk System.

While there, Itoi set up a meeting and pitched his idea, then titled "ESP1", 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. While Miyamoto liked Itoi's ideas, he reacted to the proposal with indifference, as opposed to the praise Itoi was expecting.

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.

A fan-made documentary titled Mother to Earth, developed by film group 54&O Productions, was funded by Kickstarter in 2016 and was released on October 19, 2019. The documentary originated as a single interview with Mother's localization producer, Phil Sandhop, as part of a scrapped retrospective project; director Joshua Bone-Christian approached producer Christian Deitering about producing a documentary off the interview, as Sandhop was answering numerous questions asked by the EarthBound fanbase at the time. 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. The team behind Mother to Earth were encouraged by other filmmakers during the documentary's production to heighten the drama in certain areas; the team resisted, as they felt that it the project's content would make it worth watching.