EarthBound and the RPG That Swapped Dragons for Drugstores

Most role-playing games of the 1990s sent you out to save a kingdom. EarthBound sent you out to save the world, but it started in the suburbs, with a boy in a striped shirt who fought with a baseball bat and took a bus to the next town. It is one of the boldest tonal swerves in the history of the genre.

The game was released in Japan in August 1994 as Mother 2, for the Super Famicom, and in North America in June 1995 as EarthBound, for the Super Nintendo. It was developed by Ape and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo. Its creator and writer was Shigesato Itoi, a Japanese copywriter and essayist who was already well known in Japan before he began making games. The first Mother, released for the Famicom in 1989, was never released in the West at the time, so the sequel was the international audience’s introduction to the series.

The setting is a version of modern America filtered through Japanese eyes: drugstores, arcades, hotels, cults, gift boxes and street gangs. Enemies include stray dogs, hippies and taxis. The protagonist, Ness, is a psychic child, and he is joined by Paula, Jeff and Poo. The story builds toward a confrontation with a cosmic evil named Giygas, which is unlike anything else in its generation of games, an intentionally unsettling and abstract encounter that people still discuss.

There are several ingenious mechanical ideas. Health is displayed as a rolling counter, like an odometer, and damage takes time to tick down, so that a character who takes a lethal hit can still be saved if the player heals them before the counter reaches zero. That small quirk turns a moment of panic into a moment of play. Easy fights against weak enemies can be skipped, with the game resolving them automatically once your party has outleveled them. Battle backgrounds shift and swirl in trippy patterns. These decisions all point in the same direction: respecting the player’s time and encouraging experimentation.

The game’s marketing in North America is remembered, too, though not for good reasons. It was promoted with a humorous “this game stinks” campaign that included scratch-and-sniff cards, and it came with a player’s guide in the box. It is generally reported that the game sold poorly in North America, and it was reportedly priced higher than many of its contemporaries. But it became a cult favorite over time, helped along by fans, online discussion and the later re-releases.

Its legacy runs through several places. Ness became a playable character in Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64 in 1999, giving the series a wider audience. Its influence is cited by Undertale’s creator, Toby Fox, among others. Mother 3 was released in Japan for the Game Boy Advance in 2006 and has never had an official Western release, which fans have long asked for. EarthBound itself came to the Wii U’s Virtual Console in 2013 and, in 2022, to Nintendo Switch Online, which has made the game more available than it has been in decades.

The opinion part: EarthBound is a game about the texture of everyday life, made strange. It is funny, sad and odd, and it has a sincerity that makes its jokes land. It proves that a role-playing game’s setting can be as radical as its mechanics.