I must confess something that is somewhat humiliating for someone who considers himself knowledgeable about retro RPGs — I completely blew it on EarthBound. When Nintendo finally attempted to sell this title to American children in ’95, I dismissed it entirely. Everyone I knew was raving about Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III (we now know was actually VI) and this other oddball title that had scratch and sniff cards, cartoonish marketing, etc., and looked nothing like the RPGs I was familiar with.
At age 17, I believed I was too mature and intelligent for something so… whimsical and childlike-looking as Earthbound. The ads were baffling and the box art was not at all representative of the RPGs I was accustomed to. I thought it was just a marketing ploy by Nintendo to stand out from the crowd. Therefore, I paid no attention to it and bought Secret of Mana instead with my lawn mowing money.
It’s now 2001, I’m in my early twenties and working in a dead end retail position, and I come across a tiny local game shop called Game Galaxy – you know the type, narrow aisles chock full of anything from Atari cartridges to imported Dreamcast games, owned by a large, older man named Pete, who apparently knows everything there is to know about every single game in his store. While browsing the SNES titles, Pete comes over to me and shows me a ginormous cartridge.
“Ever played Earthbound?” he asked, showing me the large cartridge.
“No,” I replied. “Heard it was weird.”
Pete chuckled. “Weird is exactly what makes it great. Kid traded it in yesterday. Said it was boring and stupid. What a loser.” He flipped the cartridge over and showed me the Nintendo logo. “Thirty-five bucks. I am telling you, this is a game that will either piss you off within the first hour or completely change how you view RPGs.”
I couldn’t afford thirty-five at the time, but I trusted Pete. He’d directed me to some quality gems previously. Plus, I was curious about this cult-classic RPG that people were writing about on the early internet forums.
That evening, I plugged the cartridge into my SNES – I still had my original console connected to a 13-inch television in my bedroom – and began to play with absolutely no expectation whatsoever. The beginning was… confusing. A meteor crashes, a boy in striped PJs, a bee explains time travel and the impending doom of the cosmos. No opening cinematic, no sweeping vista, no grand music. Just a regular suburban kid named Ness being awoken by a meteor crash.
Honestly, my initial reaction was, “What the heck is this?” The graphics looked simple, almost primitive compared to the Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy titles I was used to. The music was catchy, but it sounded nothing like the orchestral scores I was accustomed to. And the first enemy… well, the first enemies were stray dogs and crows. Not dragons, skeletons, or armored knights. Dogs and birds.
I almost turned it off after twenty minutes. It looked so bland, so odd, and so un-RPG like. But I had just dropped thirty-five bucks on it, so I figured I’d at least make it to the first town and see if I could figure out why everyone was so enamored with it.
Onett was revolutionary, not because of anything dramatic happening, but because it was so… normal. It looked like any American suburb. Pizza joints and pharmacies and police officers acting like real small-town police officers, not noble knights. You could enter houses and speak to people who said completely mundane things about their everyday lives. Onett had an incredible attention to detail that gave the world a lived-in feel rather than simply a backdrop for adventure.
And then I fought my first New Age Retro Hippie.
I clearly recall staring at the screen thinking, “Did I just get attacked by a hippie wearing a tie dye shirt who wants to reveal his ‘true’ self?” The battle background was a swirling psychedelic pattern that resembled someone feeding LSD to the SNES graphics processor. The music was this funky, jazzy song that bore no resemblance to traditional RPG battle themes. It was completely absurd and I started laughing.
This is when it clicked. This wasn’t trying to be Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. This was something entirely different, and it was taking all the conventions of RPGs and flipping them upside down. Rather than rescuing princesses, I was assisting the police in addressing a street gang known as the Sharks. Instead of purchasing swords and armor, I was equipping baseball bats and yo-yos. Instead of resting at inns, I was sleeping at hotels that resembled places you might actually rest.
The further I progressed, the weirder it became. I met a girl named Paula who’d been kidnapped by a cult — an actual cult, not some death-worshipping fantasy creatures, but people who wanted to paint everything blue and called themselves the Happy Happyists. Their leader was a man named Mr. Carpainter who spoke like a crazed fundamentalist preacher, and the whole thing was unsettling in ways fantasy villains never were able to achieve.
When I reached Moonside — this alternate dimension of a city where everything is neon and backwards and doesn’t make any sense — I realized I was playing something truly unique. Moonside was like walking through a fever dream. The NPCs spoke in contradictions (“Yes means no, no means yes”), invisible men teleported you around randomly, and the whole place had this underlying malevolent presence despite appearing to be a disco vomit.
I played that section at night with all the lights off and I am not ashamed to admit that it genuinely freaked me out. Not due to jump scares or gore, but because it messed with your perception of reality. The game was causing you to feel disoriented and confused, and that is far more effective than simply showing you scary monsters.
While the weirdness alone was enough to keep me engaged, it was how the game balanced that weirdness with legitimate emotional depth. These were not merely quirky characters spouting random dialogue. Ness battles with homesickness as an actual gameplay mechanic. Paula becomes genuinely frightened during specific story moments. Jeff has serious father issues that are not treated as comedic relief. There were genuine emotions beneath the surface of all the surreal humor.
The enemies were incredible. Where else are you going to fight something called Unassuming Local Guy or Cranky Lady? I battled animated street signs, possessed pizza boxes, and something called Abstract Art that was literally a hostile painting. Each one had their own psychedelic battle background and typically some form of ridiculous attack description. Defeating a rock band with a “SMAAAASH HIT”, or having your conscience hurt by a New Age Retro Hippie — this was comedy gold.
However, beneath all the jokes, was this growing feeling of cosmic dread. The Happy Happyists were not just silly — they were frightening once you understood they were a murderous cult. The zombies in the town of Threed revealed your neighbors as shambling monsters. And Giygas… man, Giygas was pure nightmare-fuel masquerading as a 16-bit sprite. The final boss was not some dragon you could defeat with better gear; it was incomprehensible cosmic horror that you could only damage by having Paula pray for help.
I completed my first playthrough in roughly a week, staying up late on work nights because I had to find out what happened next. Once the credits rolled and the game displayed all the characters returning to their normal lives, I felt this unusual sadness. Not simply because the game was complete, but because I knew there likely wouldn’t be another experience quite like this one.
Explaining Earthbound to my friends was futile. “So, you’re a kid with a baseball bat battling hippies and businessmen while a cosmic horror attempts to destroy reality” sounds crazy without context. It’s similar to explaining a very vivid dream — it made total sense while you experienced it, but falls apart when you attempt to verbalize it.
Many years passed. I relocated numerous times, I sold significant portions of my gaming library when finances were low, and I upgraded to newer consoles. However, I never parted with the Earthbound cartridge. During my financially strained graduate school years when I sold games to buy groceries, I held onto it for reasons unknown to me.
In approximately 2008, when I was in a particularly bad spot — job sucked, relationship was deteriorating, and overall, I felt as though I’d made all the incorrect decisions — I began rummaging through my old SNES. Perhaps it was nostalgia, perhaps desperation, but I decided to replay Earthbound. I assumed it would be a pleasant trip down memory lane, something comforting from my youth.
What I did not anticipate was how Earthbound would affect me differently as an adult. Every theme about childhood vs. adulthood, about preserving your core identity in the face of corruption, about finding your community of fellow travelers who understand you — all of these were more impactful as someone who’d experienced some real-life disappointments.
Ness’ homesickness, which I had initially viewed as an annoying status effect in my first playthrough, now felt like a poignant metaphor for abandoning safety. The game’s message about ordinary kids facing cosmic horrors through friendship and bravery — it was no longer just an adventure story, it felt like a philosophical approach to the inherent absurdity of life.
By this point, Earthbound had transitioned from a commercial flop to a celebrated cult classic via the Internet. I discovered entire communities that were devoted to dissecting its mysteries, fan translations of the Japan-only sequels, and people selling reproduction cartridges for hundreds of dollars. My $35 impulse purchase had apparently become a rare collectible.
Learning about the Mother series as a whole provided additional depth to my appreciation of Earthbound. Discovering that Earthbound was actually Mother 2, that there existed a precursor titled Mother on the Famicom, and a Game Boy Advance sequel that never released in North America — it demonstrated that I had inadvertently entered something much larger than one weird RPG.
The fan translation of Mother 3 was particularly enlightening. Playing through the sequel demonstrated how creator Shigesato Itoi had developed his storytelling to address increasingly heavy topics — such as capitalism, grief, environmental destruction — while retaining the same balance of humor and heart. It made Earthbound appear as the perfect intermediate installment of a trilogy focused upon the loss of innocence and growing up.
Earthbound’s ability to predictively forecast numerous characteristics of modern society is astounding. Corporate mind control, media manipulation, and how ordinary individuals may become swept away in destructive movements — Itoi wrote about all of these in 1994, and they seem shockingly relevant today. The Happy Happyists do not appear anywhere near as absurd in a society with social media echo chambers and political cults.
Additionally, the technical aspects remain impressive as well. Those psychedelic battle backgrounds were pushing the SNES far beyond what most developers thought was possible. The music sampling techniques were taken directly from modern pop music rather than the traditional video game composition. It was not just creative vision — it was actual technical innovation masked by the game’s weirdness.
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