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NES Earthbound 'Mystery' Probed
packratshow writes "Lost Levels has put up a story about the infamous NES prototype of classic RPG Earthbound. It includes an interview with Nintendo localization producer Phil Sandhop in which he verifies certain details about the alleged cartridges, sometimes considered to be fakes, and squashes most myths about its origin, explaining: 'EarthBound was not cancelled, it was just not produced... Sometimes these things sit for years before the studio feels its right. Nintendo had that luxury with games, especially NES games.'" We've previously mentioned the fanaticism of Earthbound fans.
I suppose I can understand skepticism when it first came out (though it seems to me like translating Mother then acting like the translation was an official prototype is a pointless thing to do), but anyone who still thought that it was fake after the updated Mother was released for the GBA in Japan is an idiot.
Rob
To an English speaker, perhaps, but not to the Japanese. The name was probably meant to suggest our "Mother Earth," given the USian name. The popular market (In Japan!) is more comfortable with effeminate or "kawaii" names and images than the USian market.
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I liked the Sonic "X-Treme" article they have on this site as well. Sounds like Sega was a real mess back then. It's suprising the Dreamcast turned out to be a great system, but i guess not so surprising that it folded.
Because it's the mother of all RPGs! Anybody who's played the game knows that!
Hell, it deserves the title because of its kitchy music alone...
well it must have been floating around for a while because i had the rom for some reason. i quickly loaded it and took some screenshots in case you want to see what it looks like
http://files.radixpub.com/earthbound/
I guess I've been hanging around kuro5hin for too long...
To call citizens of the United States "American" is to ignore the fact that, technically, Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, et al, are also from America.
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but what I really want to know about is when EarthBound / Mother 3 is coming out.
Cute or not, "Mother" in the English language doenst have the same, i assume, intended effect.
they changed it when it came to the US.
Have you ever heard of North and South America? It's a pretty big place.
Are you Icelandic or are you retarded? Read my post again. I mentioned both AND I used a big word like continent. *GASP* Go look it up. You might learn something.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
You could have just said "the US market".
I can't figure out why people keep using "USian". It looks and sounds dumb. I understand (and to some degree agree with) the intention, but is that the best word that can be created?
I always thought referring to USA citizens as "United Staters" or simply "Staters" sounds much less dumb. As far as the adjective form, "US" alone works just fine.
My stupid web site
I suppose that we could just start referring to ourselves as "Yankees" (or "Yanks" for short). But I wonder if some old-time Southern colonels will have problems with that name.
The basic story is this: Neo Demiforce (already well known in the romhacking scene) bought a prototype cartridge that was already mostly translated (the game WAS almost in stores when it was dropped), then finished it.
In order for this to be fake, someone would have had to go to the trouble to almost completely translate the game (a mammoth task for the small groups that do this unofficially, as opposed to large localization teams that have direct access to the original work's source), dump the game onto an NES cartridge, and then sell it for an amount of money not worth the time spent.
The only other possibility I see is that Neo Demiforce wouldn't want credit for all of the translation work, making up the story that Nintendo did it. That doesn't make sense either.
It's an interesting story, but were there people who actually thought this was a huge conspiracy?
Sounds bad, sure. I've never used the term in spoken conversation. I was under the assumption that part of the reason "USian" stuck was that, besides being more country-centric, was shorter to type than "American." (I've also seen UKian in use online.)
Though you are right that "US" might have worked in that case, but I had mentally "vocalized" the work as American, and my chatroom/IM typing habits took over.
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