At seventeen, I considered myself to be too mature and intelligent for something as…childish looking as Earthbound. All my friends were talking about Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy III (which we later learned was actually Final Fantasy VI), and some other bizarre title with scratch and sniff cards and cartoon style marketing. The box cover art didn’t even look like any of the RPGs I was used to. I just thought it was a marketing stunt to try and differentiate Nintendo from the competition. So, I paid it no mind and spent my lawn-mowing money on Secret of Mana instead.
Fast forward to 2001, I’m in my early twenties and working a dead-end retail job. I stumbled upon a little local game store called Game Galaxy – you know the kind, narrow aisles packed with everything from Atari cartridges to imported Dreamcast games, run by an older guy named Pete who seemed to have a wealth of knowledge on every single game in the store. As I browsed the SNES titles, Pete approached me and pulled out a gigantic cartridge.
“Ever played Earthbound?” he asked as he displayed the large cartridge.
“No,” I replied. “Heard it was weird.”
Pete laughed. “Weird is exactly what makes it great. Some kid traded it in yesterday. Said it was boring and stupid. Loser.” He flipped the cartridge over and showed me the Nintendo logo. “Thirty-five bucks. I’m telling you, this is a game that will either infuriate you in the first hour, or completely change the way you think about RPGs.”
At the time, I couldn’t afford thirty-five dollars, but I trusted Pete. He had recommended me to several good games before, and I was curious about the cult-classic RPG that people were discussing on the early days of internet forums.
That night, I inserted the cartridge into my SNES – I still had my original console hooked up to a 13 inch TV in my bedroom – and started to play with zero expectations. The beginning was…confusing. A meteor crashed, a boy in striped pyjamas, a bee explained time-travel and the impending doom of the cosmos. No opening cinematics, no grand vistas, no sweeping music. Just a regular suburban kid named Ness waking up to a meteor crash.
To be honest, my immediate reaction was, “What the heck is this?” The graphics appeared 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 used to. And the first enemy…well, the first enemies were stray dogs and crows. Not dragons, skeletons, or armoured knights. Dogs and birds.
I nearly turned it off after twenty minutes. It looked so bland, so odd, and so unlike any of the RPGs I was familiar with. But I had just spent thirty-five dollars on it, so I figured I’d at least make it to the first town and see if I could determine why everyone loved it so much.
Onett was revolutionary, not because of any epic events occurring, but because it was so…normal. It looked like any average American suburb. Pizza shops, pharmacies, and police officers acting like real small-town police officers, not noble knights. You could go inside houses and talk to people who said completely mundane things about their daily lives. Onett had an amazing attention to detail that made the world feel lived-in rather than simply a backdrop for adventure.
Then I fought my first New Age Retro Hippie.
I distinctly remember sitting in front of my TV, staring at the screen thinking, “Did I just get attacked by a hippie wearing a tie-dye shirt who wants to show me his ‘real’ self?” The battle background was a swirling psychedelic pattern that looked as though someone was giving LSD to the SNES graphics processor. The music was this zany, jazzy tune that had no resemblance to traditional RPG battle tunes. It was utter absurdity, and I started laughing.
That’s when it hit me. This wasn’t attempting to be Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. This was something totally different and was turning all the conventions of RPGs on their head. Instead of rescuing princesses, I was helping the local police department take care of a street gang called the Sharks. Instead of buying swords and armour, I was equipping baseball bats and yo-yos. Instead of resting at inns, I was sleeping at hotels that looked like the kinds of places you would actually sleep.
As I continued to play, it got stranger and stranger. I met a girl named Paula, who had been kidnapped by a cult — an actual cult, not some death-worshipping fantasy creature, but a group of people that wanted to paint everything blue and called themselves the Happy Happyists. The cult’s leader, Mr. Carpainter, talked like a crazed fundamentalist preacher, and the whole thing unsettled me in ways that fantasy villains never could.
Once I reached Moonside — a parallel dimension of a city where everything is neon and backwards and makes no sense — I realised I was playing something totally unique. Moonside was like walking through a fever dream. The NPCs spoke in contradictions (“Yes means no, no means yes”), invisible guys teleport you around randomly, and the whole area has this undercurrent of malice despite appearing to be a vomiting mess of colour and light.
I played that part at night with all the lights turned off, and I’m not embarrassed to admit it freaked me out — not because of jump scares or gore, but because it messed with your perception of reality. The game caused you to feel disoriented and confused, and that is far more effective than simply showing you scary monsters.
While the sheer strangeness of the game kept me engaged, it was the way the game balanced that strangeness with legitimate emotional depth that impressed me. These were not simply quirky characters saying weird stuff for no reason. Ness deals with homesickness as an actual gameplay element. Paula gets genuinely scared in certain parts of the story. Jeff has serious dad issues that aren’t portrayed as comedic relief. There are real feelings hidden beneath all the wacky humour.
The enemies were also incredible. Where else are you going to fight an Unassuming Local Guy or a Cranky Lady? I fought 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 generally a ridiculously descriptive attack name. Beating a rock band with a “SMAAAASH HIT!”, or getting emotionally beaten by a New Age Retro Hippie — this was comedic gold.
But beneath all the jokes, was this growing feeling of existential dread. The Happy Happyists weren’t just funny — they were terrifying once you understood that they were a murderous cult. The zombies in Threed exposed your neighbours as shambling monsters. And Giygas…Giygas was pure nightmare fuel wrapped in a 16-bit sprite package. The final boss was not some dragon you defeated with better equipment; it was an incomprehensible cosmic horror that you could only harm by having Paula pray for help.
I finished my first playthrough in roughly a week, spending many late work nights playing until I found out what happened next. After the credits rolled and the game showed all the characters back to their normal lives, I felt a strange sadness. Not just because the game was done, but because I knew that I probably wouldn’t experience another game like this one again.
Describing Earthbound to my friends was pointless. “You’re a kid with a baseball bat fighting hippies and businessmen while a cosmic horror tries to destroy the universe” is crazy without context. It’s like describing a really vivid dream — it made total sense while you were experiencing it, but breaks apart when you try to describe it.
Many years went by. I moved multiple times. I sold a bunch of my gaming library when I was broke. I upgraded to newer consoles. But I’ve never gotten rid of the Earthbound cartridge. In fact, I held onto it through my graduate school years when I was dirt poor and had to sell games to buy food, and I don’t know why.
In approximately 2008, when I was in a terrible spot — job sucked, relationship was falling apart, and I felt like I’d made every wrong decision in my life — I started digging through my old SNES. Either it was nostalgia, or desperation, but I decided to play Earthbound again. I assumed it would be a nice trip down memory lane, something that would bring me comfort from my past.
What I didn’t realise was how Earthbound would affect me differently as an adult. Everything about the game that dealt with the contrast of childhood and adulthood, and finding your group of people who share your values and can help you overcome adversity, resonated with me on a deeper level now that I’ve gone through some real-world disappointments.
Ness’ homesickness, which I had thought was an annoyance as a status effect in my first playthrough, now seemed like a metaphor for leaving behind the safe haven of your youth. The game’s message about ordinary kids facing cosmic horrors together through friendship and courage — it was no longer just an adventure story, it was a philosophy about the absurd nature of life.
By this point, Earthbound had evolved from a commercial failure to a beloved cult classic thanks to the internet. I found a number of communities dedicated to analysing the game’s mysteries, fan translations of the Japan-only sequels, and people selling reproduction cartridges for hundreds of dollars. Apparently, my $35 impulse buy had become a rare collector’s item.
Reading about the Mother series as a whole added more depth to my understanding of Earthbound. Learning that Earthbound was Mother 2, learning that there was a predecessor entitled Mother on the Famicom, and learning about a Game Boy Advance sequel that never came to North America — it showed that I had unwittingly joined a franchise that was much bigger than just one strange RPG.
The fan translation of Mother 3 was especially revealing. Reading through the sequel showed that creator Shigesato Itoi had developed his storytelling to tackle increasingly heavier subject matter — including capitalism, grief, and environmental disaster — while maintaining the same balance of humour and heart. It made Earthbound appear as the perfect middle act in a trilogy that followed the loss of innocence and growing up.
Earthbound’s ability to foreshadow various characteristics of modern society is remarkable. Mind control by corporations, manipulation of the media, and how regular individuals can become swept up in destructive movements — Itoi wrote about all of those in 1994, and they seem shockingly relevant today. The Happy Happyists seem far less absurd in a world of social media echo chambers and political cults.
Also, the technical aspects of the game remain impressive as well. Those psychedelic battle backgrounds pushed the SNES far beyond what most developers thought was possible. The use of music sampling techniques were directly borrowed from modern pop music, rather than the standard video game score compositions. It wasn’t just creative vision — it was actual technical innovation hiding behind the game’s weirdness.
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