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"I wanted a weak hero. The main character in Mother has asthma, and his dad is never around. That was the setup I had in mind when wondering what kind of adventure story I could make."
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In a 1997 interview with game's composer Keiichi Suzuki published in the GSLA, he stated that originally his goal for the game was to write pop music. It was a request from Shigesato Itoi, who wanted Suzuki to make pop music with real vocals, and then use instrumental versions of those songs in the game:
"It was rare to see something like that in game music in those days. Mother was a Famicom game, and RPGs back then had to use arpeggiation to express chords and harmony, so the melodies in most games tended to sound rather classical. There was nothing like genuine pop music in Famicom games then."
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Most of the game's locations were renamed for American audiences, as some of the cities were named after holidays or had religious references.
•Mother's Day was renamed Podunk.
•Thanksgiving was renamed Merrysville.
•Santa Claus Station was renamed Union Station.
•Halloween was renamed Spookane.
•Easter was renamed Youngtown.
•The Advent Desert was renamed the Yucca Desert.
•Valentine was renamed Ellay.
•Holy Loly Mountain was renamed Mt. Itoi.
•Mother's Day was renamed Podunk.
•Thanksgiving was renamed Merrysville.
•Santa Claus Station was renamed Union Station.
•Halloween was renamed Spookane.
•Easter was renamed Youngtown.
•The Advent Desert was renamed the Yucca Desert.
•Valentine was renamed Ellay.
•Holy Loly Mountain was renamed Mt. Itoi.
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A ROM-translating group, "Neo Demiforce", created a ROM that circumvents the anti-piracy measures. They also added the word "Zero" to the title screen in order to prevent confusion with Mother 2, released in North America as Earthbound for SNES.
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4 prototype cartridges were owned by collectors, and the fifth was owned by Nintendo of America Inc.
The English translation was complete, but it was never released in North America until 25 years later.
On June 14 at Nintendo World Championships 2015 Nintendo announced Mother was coming to the Wii U Virtual Console, under the title "EarthBound Beginnings".
subdirectory_arrow_right Mother 1+2 (Game)
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The version of Mother included in the Japanese-only compilation Mother 1+2 for the Game Boy Advance is actually the unreleased U.S prototype translated back into Japanese.
The Cutting Room Floor articles:
https://tcrf.net/Mother_1%2B2
https://tcrf.net/EarthBound_Beginnings/Regional_Differences
https://tcrf.net/Mother_1%2B2
https://tcrf.net/EarthBound_Beginnings/Regional_Differences
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According to Phil Sandhop, the script writer for the unpublished English release of Mother, the process of localizing the game motivated Nintendo to design games with an international audience in mind, to minimize localization efforts in the future.
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Itoi has said that the difficulty of Mt. Itoi was due to his attitude towards the end of development. During the fine tuning phase of development, when it came to Mt. Itoi, he had enough.
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If the player walks through the tunnel leading to Reindeer prior to actually taking the train, they will find a pile of bones. If the player talks to it, it'll say "Get on the train, or you will have a hard time like me."
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In the English prototype of Mother, some of the characters were redesigned, possibly to avoid resembling characters from Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip. One NPC character was given pigtails to reduce her resemblance to Marcy, Peppermint Patty's best friend, and the dust cloud was removed from an NPC that looked like "Pigpen". Ninten's mom was also given a different hairstyle, possibly because it resembled Sally Brown, Charlie Brown's sister. Ironically, Ninten's shirt was given a stripe, which made him look similar to Charlie Brown.
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The US prototype of Mother has some enemies that are edited to remove knives, blood, smoking, and shiny breasts for censorship reasons.
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