May 15th, 2012 | MOTHER 3, Uncommon Knowledge | 11 Comments

Many years ago, well before MOTHER 3′s release, Brownie Brown (the game’s developer) posted a mysterious Flash animation on its website. With the help of a fellow forumgoer, I translated the text into English. If you’ve never seen the animation, check it out here: View Brownie Brown’s “Project B” There had been no news about MOTHER 3 in years, so the fan resp...Read More »

March 27th, 2012 | MOTHER 3, Uncommon Knowledge | 10 Comments

I thought I had posted about this before, but I guess not! A fellow named John reminded me that Nintendo and a bunch of other people applied for a patent many years ago for the music battle system used in MOTHER 3. You can see more pics and info in the entire patent file right here: Patent (English, PDF) I think we first discovered this in 2004, around the time MOTHER 1+2 was first announced: P...Read More »

March 4th, 2012 | EarthBound, Events, Itoi, Uncommon Knowledge | 8 Comments

Just before MOTHER 2′s release in Japan in 1994, a special celebratory event was held for all of the staff members who worked on the game. Chewy’s translated an article about it and included lots of scans of pictures from the event, check it all out here! The event hall The official figures were displayed My favorite quote is probably this part of Miyamoto’s speech: “These fi...Read More »

January 15th, 2012 | EarthBound, Uncommon Knowledge, Videos | 38 Comments

Many years ago the Happy Video Game Nerd posted a really cool and in-depth video about EarthBound. He recently revised it and added lots more info – grab a sandwich or something and check it out here or check it out below! It was actually when I was writing an e-mail to him yesterday that I remembered that weird MOTHER 3 e-mail from 2008. I guess maybe he can add that to his next revision i...Read More »

November 29th, 2011 | Audio Stuff, Smash Bros., Uncommon Knowledge, Videos | 24 Comments

Juanito sent me a couple videos taken back in 2001. I had forgotten about these, they’re pretty cool. First, here’s the opening video being shown to the public for the first time. You can hear people getting especially excited about Ness: Next is this other video that has a drastically different version of Bein’ Friends during the Onett stage: I gotta say, I think I like this o...Read More »

November 11th, 2011 | Audio Stuff, MOTHER 1, Uncommon Knowledge | 12 Comments

Many MOTHER/EarthBound fans already know that the official MOTHER 1 soundtrack CD is really cool and not just tunes straight from the game – most of it is music from the game rearranged to sound like pop music of some sort. A couple of these were sung by a girl named Catherine Warwick: If you don’t have a copy of the MOTHER 1 CD, here’s Pollyanna, one of the handful of songs she...Read More »

July 19th, 2011 | EarthBound, Interviews, Itoi | 10 Comments

Shigesato Itoi’s main job nowadays is mostly just chatting with and interviewing all kinds of people, and today I stumbled across a recent multi-part discussion he had with an illustrator and book designer (Ayumi Ohashi), and at one point he briefly brings up some MOTHER stuff. (context: Ohashi is talking about working with different types of people and how different people will act differ...Read More »

May 2nd, 2011 | Interviews, Itoi, MOTHER 1, Uncommon Knowledge | 10 Comments

I’m a little late to the party, but some weeks back Chewy posted her translation of an interview Shigesato Itoi did months before MOTHER 1′s release in 1989. Check it out here! Here’s a random snippet: Plans for MOTHER first took shape two years ago, but at that time all I was thinking about was whether I’d be able to have someone make a game for me. I called up a friend and a...Read More »

April 20th, 2011 | MOTHER 3 | 66 Comments

Today’s April 20th, which means many things for many different people – and it also marks the day MOTHER 3 was released. The game was released in 2006, so it’s five years old now. Man, has it been that long already? Looking back, we started EarthBound.Net/Starmen.Net only three and a half years after EarthBound’s release, and here we are five years after the sequel’...Read More »

April 9th, 2011 | EarthBound, Interviews, Uncommon Knowledge, Videos | 9 Comments

Recently, Roo (the cool dude who made that EarthBound documentary and currently owns an EarthBound Zero prototype) met up with Reid, the co-founder of Starmen.Net and the guy behind Fangamer to talk about EarthBound, the EarthBound community, and all sorts of stuff. Some of the topics include: Nintendo Power’s coverage of EarthBound and buying EarthBound on release day How Starmen.Net came...Read More »