After nearly 11 years from its original announcement, Mother 3 is finally out, in the public, and slowly reaching the hands of early importers. It launched before the legendary Golden Week in Japan, used one of the best and most beautiful 2D-exclusive in-house developers Nintendo currently has in their arsenal, and an ancient Internet community is going absoutely ballistic over a game they can’t even understand yet — but so what? What’s the deal with this game? Why would I offer up my skin in order to just play this freaking game in English?

More importantly, why is this a big deal in Nintendo history?

Because it’s Earthbound.

Earthbound’s definitely a game that, unless you were into RPGs on the SNES during its heyday, you probably have heard about, but never played. Unless you were into the whole emulation thing, this is a game that, for all intents and purposes, was a tough store find. Whenever they DID happen to have this game, you’d find it in the same condition that they found stuff owned by King Tut - damaged, faded, and pretty much in a couple pieces all over the place. While you could buy the cart, you won’t have the box; or you can buy the game and the box, but you won’t have the special edition strategy guide packed with full-sized artwork, great jokes, and scratch and barf-flavored scratch n’ sniff cards!

But if you were like me and bought the game up as soon as it came out, you’re no stranger to exactly why a game about four unlikely kid heroes is so hard to find. You play it, it makes you smile from ear to ear, and you never let it go. The game holds such a deep place in your heart that, just like a mother’s relationship with a child, you just don’t want to let it go. Heck, I don’t even let my cart go into that drawer packed with gray carts - it doesn’t deserve to rot in there with the rest of them!

I beat the game almost ten times when I got it as a little kid - it was just perfect! Everything about that game made my heart smile, even at such a young age. The issue, though, was the very last bit of text: “The End?”

You can imagine what kind of effects that’d have on the mind of a little kid. Your imagination just stares at it, mouth wide open, and screams - “OH MY DEAR GOD WHAT COULD IT BE?!”

But Earthbound 64 came along, somehow. Nintendo of Japan had announced the game in freaking 1996, as a staple for the famous Nintendo experiment, the 64DD. Screenshots peered through the fog of unknowingness, and in them, we saw things that were distinctly not the Earthbound we remember. Pickle cars? Zombies? Cowboys? What are these things I’m seeing? My 10-year-old eyes felt like were going to explode! How dare they take something I loved so much and turn it on its head!

But that feeling subsided, and I joined the fight at Earthbound.net (which eventually became Starmen.net, unfortunately thanks to my indirect actions. Don’t tell anybody!) to bring this game into American hands. We made petition after petition, reaching these unheard of sizes when it came to these things. I’m not saying these things were just big; they were freaking MASSIVE. Reidman, current and founding administrator, printed this thing out, and it reached an absolutely mammoth 205 pages, with 819 signatures on EACH page, double sided. That’s a LOT.

They sent the petition off to Nintendo of Japan’s headquarters, and nothing significant was ever sent back. There were some rumors that NoJ gave us some nods about it, but we never even got to see the 64 game see the light of day anywhere. It was canned, mid-way through, because of Itoi and Nintendo’s agreement that the game just wasn’t going in the direction they’d hoped. The team they were working with didn’t even know how to do this ‘3D’ thing, Itoi was running out of time, and public interest was steadily waning from the lack of actual news.

And the Earthbound front was quiet. From Itoi’s official game obituary in 2000 to the release of Mother 1+2 for the GBA in 2003, there was nothing but radio static from the franchise so many people have become nearly fanatical about. But we waited patiently for something - anything. Strangely, even though the Internet community supporting Earthbound was as sparse and separated as planets, we all held one silent hope in our minds: this game isn’t done.

Nintendo has a rarely-explicit tendency to make incredible sounding games really early on, but then cancel them out of nowhere. Games like Dragon Quest VII, Joust 64, Kirby’s Air Ride, Zelda: Master Quest, Kid Icarus SNES, Star Fox 2 — the list just goes on and on. After 2003’s Japan-only release of Mother 1+2, most of us realized that nothing survived of Earthbound 64, and Mother 3 had no hope of ever appearing, ever again.

But then one day, Nintendo reversed Nintendo history. Late one 2004 day a translated Japanese advertisement for Mother 1+2 appeared on the Internet. It was fairly usual, but there was a three-second flash at the end that exploded hope into all of us who waited 8 years to hear: “We’re making Mother 3 for the Gameboy, too!”

I stared agape at my monitor for, like, fifteen minutes. Nintendo is actually releasing this game. Like, seriously.

Skip forward to today and you’ll see that Mother 3 was released upon the world, and sold its way through Japan like Godzilla plowing through buildings. People snatched it up right away, and the resulting clamor for an American release nearly destroyed a small country. Well, not so much that last one - but believe me, the sales for the game are shaping up quickly to justify the nearly year-long position in Famitsu’s Most Wanted Games.

Overall, though, what does this mean for we Nintendo fans? What does this game’s release mean in the grand scheme of things? We’re not sure just quite yet, as there’s been no actual confirmation for an English release - but if it finds its way into our hands by next fall, we’ll definitely be standing on the threshold of something we’ve barely ever seen before in Nintendo history; where fans have clamored so hard, and so long, Nintendo not only pulled a game in from the land of ghost and wind, but remade it, ported it, roped in one of their most important Japanese developers, and released a game amidst a mountain of Japanese fanfare (which I can only assume sounds like, “domo arigato, Mr. Nintendo”). If they release it in English in only a few months, we’ll see something else - an English turnaround we’ve only seen applied to the feverous audience Pokemon offers.

Could it be that, after all these years, our fanboyism actually paid off? Seems to be so. And who said that Nintendo doesn’t pay attention to its fans?

But most importantly, Mother 3’s release represents something much grander. I grew up with this game firmly planted in my memories as that game that represents that beautiful, childlike persistence. I can sit down, and play Earthbound beginning to end in one sitting, and not even care about the time that disappeared. That’s a special quality for me, of which only Psychonauts has taken as well. We all have that game, and imagine that game rising from its grave, popping out a sequel, and realizing that this game doesn’t actually ruin what you held as a child.

That’s an experience that’s just amazing.

So show your support for this game, guys. For every Nintendo fan from the SNES generation and before, this game represents something that we’ve seen only a few times before - when Nintendo not only gave us a game that had a cult following, but even went as far to completely rebuild it from the grave just to deliver a game that had a more or less lukewarm fanfare outside of Japan.

Mark your calendars - for the first time, 4/20 won’t be known for two rather bad events. Be sure to leave your own experiences with Earthbound and what it means to you in the comments! We’d love to hear them!