FEATURES - EarthBound - Mother 1 Game Description :: In 1989, Japanese thespian and TV personality Shigesato Itoi collaborated with HAL Laboratories to create what would become a very different kind of RPG; one that took place in modern times, with a modern take on magic spells (psychic powers), everyday items and locations, and somewhat extraordinary events, characters and places he felt the player could actually relate to. This game, Mother, an RPG about a boy, a strange family legacy, an evil mind-warping alien, and a matriarch of a lost world in the clouds, set forward one of Nintendo's most critically acclaimed series. Mother was a smash hit in Japan. Main character, Ninten, and his friends became fan favorites, spinning-off manga by the truckload. This came mainly because RPGs, in Japan, were and still are extremely popular, far moreso than they ever will be in America. Fearing the game wouldn't see any profit stateside, Nintendo later pulled the plug on Mother's English translation, and only one copy of the game in full English text survived. For reasons yet unclear, Nintendo later auctioned off the game to a seemingly random game collector. In 1998, the world's only owner of a translated Mother sold the game to a group of game hackers who in-turn dumped the cartridge onto an illegal computer-based copy (a "ROM"). Upon the eve of April 27th, 1998, the ROM was set free to roam the internet. By then, Mother's sequel's American counterpart, EarthBound, had grown a large internet fanbase, so the ROM was eaten up. Thousands and thousands of fans of the sequel have gotten a chance to fall in-love with their new old game, appropriately dubbed "EarthBound Zero". These days, with Mother making huge appearances in the Super Smash Bros. games, coupled with Nintendo constantly beating on websites for hosting illegal ROMs, fans find it hard to believe that the company wouldn't release the original Mother in America in some form someday. Only time will tell.