Game: Earth Bound Zero:Mother

Mother (マザー Mazā?) is a role-playing video game developed by Nintendo Tokyo Research and Development Products in cooperation with Ape. The game was published for the Family Computer (Famicom) video game console. It was designed and directed by Shigesato Itoi and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, with music by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka. It is the first game in the Mother video game series (otherwise known as the EarthBound series), and was never released outside of Japan. In 2003, the game was re-released in Japan as a compilation with its sequel EarthBound as Mother 1+2, containing the changes found in the unreleased English prototype. The game's taglines are "No crying until the ending" (エンディングまで泣くんじゃない Endingu made nakun janai) and "Guaranteed Masterpiece" (名作保証, Meisaku hoshō). Mother tells the story of a psychic boy from Mother's Day (マザーズデイ; Podunk in the English Prototype), a fictional town. The boy, whose default name is Ninten, sets out on a journey to discover the cause of the mysterious phenomenon that occurred in his home one day. As the story develops, he meets friends along the way, and they fight their way to the source of all their troubles. At the time, most role-playing games took place in similar overall settings; worlds modeled after the Middle Ages and focusing on swords and magic, with very few exceptions (among them Square's Tom Sawyer). Mother takes place during a more modern time (1980s) in the United States and has equipment like baseball bats instead of swords and psychic powers (PK/PSI) instead of magic. Mother was scheduled to be released in North America as Earth Bound in the fall of 1991, but marketing delayed and eventually removed the game from the release schedule, putting it on indefinite hold. The game was again considered for release in 1994[citation needed], shortly before the release of its sequel, Mother 2: Gyiyg no Gyakushū. However, it was decided to pass on the release of Earth Bound and to localize Mother 2 under the title EarthBound. An official localization prototype of this "Earth Bound" made its way to the internet via a fan-translation group, Demiforce. The ROM binary data from the prototype was extracted and circulated under the original title and as "EarthBound Zero" on January 15, 1998