Mother (video game)

Mother
Japanese Family Computer box art
Developer(s)	Ape Inc.[a] Nintendo Tokyo R&D Products
Publisher(s)	Nintendo
Director(s)	Shigesato Itoi
Producer(s)	Shigeru Miyamoto
Designer(s)	Shigesato Itoi Miyuki Kure
Programmer(s)	Kazuya Nakatani Takayuki Onodera Motoo Yasuma
Artist(s)	Shinbo Minami Tatsuya Ishii
Writer(s)	Shigesato Itoi
Composer(s)	Keiichi Suzuki Hirokazu Tanaka
Series	Mother
Platform(s)	Family Computer Game Boy Advance
Release	JP: July 27, 1989 Mother 1+2 JP: June 20, 2003
Genre(s)	Role-playing
Mode(s)	Single-player

Mother,^[b] officially known outside of Japan as EarthBound Beginnings, is a 1989 role-playing video game developed by Ape Inc. and Nintendo and published by Nintendo for the Family Computer. It is the first entry in the Mother series and was first released in Japan on July 27, 1989. The game was re-released in Japan along with its sequel on the single-cartridge compilation Mother 1+2 for the Game Boy Advance in 2003.^[1] The game follows a young American boy named Ninten as he uses his great-grandfather's studies on psychic powers to put an end to the paranormal phenomena spiraling the country into disarray.

Writer and director Shigesato Itoi pitched Mother's concept to Shigeru Miyamoto while visiting Nintendo's headquarters for other business. Though Miyamoto rejected the proposal at first, he eventually gave Itoi a development team. Modeled after the gameplay of the Dragon Quest series, Mother subverted its fantasy genre contemporaries by being set in an offbeat parody of the late 20th-century United States. Itoi sought to incorporate standard RPG staples within the framework of a modern-day setting, parodying Western culture and Americana. As such, throughout the game, players use medication and hospitals to restore their health, utilize baseball bats and toy guns to fight enemies, and encounter aliens, robots, possessed objects, and brainwashed animals and humans. Mother uses random encounters to enter a menu-based, first-person perspective battle system.

Mother sold around 400,000 copies upon its release, where it was praised for its similarities to the Dragon Quest series and its simultaneous parody of the genre's tropes, though its high difficulty level and balance issues polarized critics. A North American localization of Mother was completed and slated for release as Earth Bound, but was abandoned as being commercially nonviable. A finished prototype was later found and publicly circulated on the Internet under the informal title EarthBound Zero. Though many critics considered Mother's sequel to be similar and an overall better implementation of its gameplay ideas, Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com wrote that Mother importantly generated interest in video game emulation and the historical preservation of unreleased games.

In 1994, Mother's sequel, Mother 2: Gīgu no Gyakushū, was released in Japan for the Super Famicom, which was localized and released in America in 1995 under the name "EarthBound". EarthBound initially flopped in the U.S., but later gained a cult following and became retrospectively viewed as a cult classic. EarthBound was followed by the Japan-only sequel Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance in 2006. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of EarthBound's U.S. release, Mother was released globally as EarthBound Beginnings for the Wii U Virtual Console in June 2015, and was released alongside EarthBound for Nintendo Switch Online in February 2022.

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