Man, I have to admit something that’s kind of embarrassing for someone who claims to know retro RPGs – I completely whiffed on EarthBound when it mattered. Back in ’95, when Nintendo was actually trying to sell this thing to American kids, I was totally ignoring it. I mean, everyone I knew was talking about Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III (which we now know was actually VI, but whatever), and here’s this weird game with scratch-and-sniff cards and marketing that made it look like some kiddie nonsense.
I was seventeen, thought I was way too sophisticated for anything that looked that… I don’t know, cartoony? The ads were bizarre, the box art looked nothing like the fantasy RPGs I was used to, and honestly, the whole thing just seemed like Nintendo trying too hard to be different. So I ignored it completely, spent my lawn-mowing money on Secret of Mana instead.
Fast forward to 2001. I’m in my early twenties, working at a dead-end retail job, and I stumble into this little game shop called Game Galaxy – you know the type, cramped aisles stuffed with everything from Atari cartridges to Dreamcast imports, run by this heavyset guy named Pete who somehow knew the entire history of every game in his store. I was browsing the SNES section, looking for anything interesting I might’ve missed, when Pete walks over with this oversized cartridge.
“You ever play EarthBound?” he asks, holding up this chunky thing that looked way bigger than a normal Super Nintendo game.
“Nah,” I said. “Heard it was weird.”
Pete kind of snorted. “Yeah, it’s weird. That’s what makes it good. Kid traded it in yesterday, said it was ‘boring and stupid.’ His loss.” He flipped the cartridge over, showing me the Nintendo seal. “Thirty-five bucks. I’m telling you, this is one of those games you’ll either hate in the first hour or it’ll completely change how you think about RPGs.”
Thirty-five was steep for my budget at the time, but something about Pete’s conviction… I don’t know, I trusted the guy. He’d steered me toward some real gems before. Plus, I was curious about this game that had developed this weird cult following among people on early internet forums.
That night, I popped it into my SNES – this was back when I still had my original system hooked up to a little 13-inch TV in my bedroom – and started playing with absolutely zero expectations. The opening was… confusing. There’s a meteor, this kid in striped pajamas, and then a bee starts talking about time travel and cosmic destruction. No opening cutscene with dramatic music and sweeping vistas. Just this regular suburban kid named Ness getting woken up by a meteor crash.
My first thought was honestly, “What the hell is this supposed to be?” The graphics looked simple, almost primitive compared to something like Secret of Mana or Final Fantasy. The music was catchy but totally unlike the orchestral stuff I was used to. And the first enemies… man, the first enemies were stray dogs and crows. Not dragons or skeletons or armored knights. Dogs and birds.
I almost turned it off after twenty minutes. It felt so basic, so weird, so completely unlike what I thought an RPG should be. But I’d just dropped thirty-five bucks on this thing, so I figured I’d at least get to the first town and see what all the fuss was about.
Onett was a revelation. Not because anything particularly dramatic happened, but because it was so… normal. It looked like any American suburb. There were pizza joints and drugstores and cops who acted like actual small-town cops, not noble knights or whatever. You could go into houses and talk to people who said completely mundane things about their daily lives. There was this incredible attention to detail that made the world feel lived-in rather than just designed as a backdrop for adventure.
And then I fought my first New Age Retro Hippie.
I remember staring at the screen thinking, “Did I just get attacked by a guy in tie-dye who wants to show me his ‘real’ self?” The battle background was this swirling, psychedelic pattern that looked like someone had fed LSD into the SNES graphics chip. The music was this funky, almost jazzy tune that had nothing to do with traditional RPG battle themes. It was so completely absurd that I started laughing.
That’s when it clicked. This wasn’t trying to be Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. This was something entirely different, something that was taking all the conventions I expected from RPGs and turning them inside out. Instead of saving princesses, I was helping cops deal with a street gang called the Sharks. Instead of buying swords and armor, I was equipping baseball bats and yo-yos. Instead of staying at inns, I was crashing at hotels that looked like real places you might actually stay.
The further I got, the weirder it became. I met this girl named Paula who’d been kidnapped by a cult – an actual cult, not some fantasy death-worshippers, but people who wanted to paint everything blue and called themselves the Happy Happyists. Their leader was this guy Mr. Carpainter who talked like a crazed fundamentalist preacher, and the whole thing was disturbing in a way that fantasy villains never managed to be.
By the time I hit Moonside – this alternate dimension version of a city where everything is neon and backwards and nothing makes sense – I realized I was playing something genuinely special. 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 menace despite looking like a disco threw up everywhere.
I played that section late at night with all the lights off, and I’m not ashamed to say it genuinely creeped me out. Not because of jump scares or gore, but because it messed with your perception of reality. The game was making you feel disoriented and confused, which is way more effective than just showing you scary monsters.
What really got me hooked wasn’t just the weirdness though – it was how the game balanced that strangeness with genuine emotion. These weren’t just quirky characters spouting random dialogue. Ness deals with homesickness as an actual gameplay mechanic. Paula gets legitimately scared during certain story beats. Jeff has daddy issues that aren’t played for laughs. There were real feelings underneath all the surreal humor.
The enemies were incredible. Where else are you going to fight something called an “Unassuming Local Guy” or a “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 usually some kind of absurd attack description. Getting defeated by a “smaaaash hit” from a rock band or having your “conscience… hurt” by a New Age Retro Hippie – this stuff was comedy gold.
But underneath all the jokes was this growing sense of cosmic dread. The Happy Happyists weren’t just silly – they were genuinely frightening once you realized they were a murderous cult. The zombie town of Threed showed you your neighbors turned into shambling monsters. And Giygas… man, Giygas was nightmare fuel disguised as an 16-bit sprite. The final boss wasn’t some dragon you could defeat with better equipment; it was incomprehensible cosmic horror that you could only hurt by having Paula pray for help.
I finished my first playthrough in about a week, staying up way too late on work nights because I absolutely had to see what happened next. When the credits rolled and the game showed you all these characters returning to their normal lives, I felt this strange melancholy. Not just because the game was over, but because I knew there probably wasn’t going to be another experience quite like this one.
Trying to explain EarthBound to my friends was hopeless. “So you’re a kid with a baseball bat fighting hippies and businessmen while a cosmic horror tries to destroy reality” sounds insane without context. It’s like trying to describe a really vivid dream – it made perfect sense while you were experiencing it, but falls apart when you try to put it into words.
Years went by. I moved apartments multiple times, sold off chunks of my game collection when money got tight, upgraded to newer systems. But that EarthBound cartridge never left my collection. Even during my broke graduate school years when I was selling games to pay for groceries, something made me hold onto it.
Around 2008, when I was going through a particularly rough patch – job was terrible, relationship was falling apart, generally feeling like I’d made all the wrong choices – I found myself digging out my old SNES. Maybe it was nostalgia, maybe desperation, but I decided to replay EarthBound. I expected it to be a nice trip down memory lane, something comforting from my younger days.
What I didn’t expect was how differently it would hit me as an adult. All those themes about childhood versus growing up, about maintaining your essential self in the face of a corrupt world, about finding your tribe of people who understand you – they resonated way harder from the perspective of someone who’d accumulated some real-world disappointments.
Ness’s homesickness, which had just been an annoying status effect during my first playthrough, suddenly felt like a profound commentary on leaving safety behind. The game’s message about ordinary kids confronting cosmic horror through friendship and courage wasn’t just an adventure story anymore – it felt like a philosophy for dealing with life’s inherent absurdity.
By this point, the internet had transformed EarthBound from commercial failure to celebrated cult classic. I discovered whole communities dedicated to analyzing its mysteries, fan translations of the Japan-only sequels, and people selling reproduction cartridges for hundreds of dollars. That random thirty-five dollar purchase had apparently become quite the collectible.
Learning about the Mother series as a whole added new layers to my appreciation. Finding out EarthBound was actually Mother 2, that there was a predecessor on the Famicom and a Game Boy Advance sequel that never made it to America – it made me realize I’d stumbled into something much bigger than just one weird RPG.
The fan translation of Mother 3 was particularly eye-opening. Playing through that sequel showed how creator Shigesato Itoi had evolved his storytelling to tackle even heavier themes – capitalism, grief, environmental destruction – while keeping that same blend of humor and heart. It made EarthBound feel like the perfect middle chapter of a trilogy about growing up and losing innocence.
What’s amazing about EarthBound is how it anticipated so many things about modern life. The corporate mind control, the media manipulation, the way ordinary people can get swept up in destructive movements – Itoi was writing about stuff in 1994 that feels incredibly relevant today. The Happy Happyists don’t seem nearly as absurd in an era of social media echo chambers and political cults.
The technical aspects are still impressive too. Those psychedelic battle backgrounds were pushing the SNES way beyond what most developers thought was possible. The music sampling techniques were borrowed from contemporary pop production rather than typical video game composition. This wasn’t just creative vision – it was genuine technical innovation disguised as weirdness.
A couple years ago, I finally got the chance to introduce my teenage nephew to EarthBound through the Wii U Virtual Console. He’s a kid raised on Fortnite and Minecraft, used to games with photo-realistic graphics and endless customization options. I wasn’t sure how he’d react to this pixelated relic from 1995.
“This looks… old,” was his first observation, which, fair enough.
“Just give it an hour,” I told him. “If you’re not into it by the time you fight the Titanic Ant, we’ll try something else.”
Twenty minutes in, he was asking questions. “Why does that photographer keep showing up?” “What’s with the ‘fuzzy pickles’?” “Are the Mr. Saturn things supposed to be aliens?”
By Twoson, he was hooked. Started texting me screenshots of dialogue he found funny, theories about the story, observations I’d never noticed even after multiple playthroughs. Watching a new generation connect with this game was incredibly satisfying – proof that good design transcends technical limitations and generational differences.
EarthBound taught me that games could be genuinely artistic without being pretentious, deeply weird without being incomprehensible, and emotionally affecting without being manipulative. It showed me that the medium’s potential went way beyond what I’d imagined, that someone with a unique vision and the freedom to express it could create something truly special.
Twenty-plus years later, I still think about EarthBound regularly. Not just as a gaming experience, but as an example of what’s possible when creative people are allowed to make exactly what they want without worrying about market research or focus groups. It’s a reminder that the best art often comes from the margins, from projects that seem too weird or risky for mainstream success but end up influencing everything that comes after.
That oversized cartridge is still sitting on my game shelf, now in a protective case not just because of its monetary value but because of what it represents – a completely unexpected journey into what games could be when freed from convention. I’ve played thousands of games since then, many with better graphics, more complex systems, bigger budgets. But very few have matched EarthBound’s perfect blend of humor and horror, its willingness to be genuinely strange while telling a story of surprising emotional depth.
For a game about fighting cosmic horror, its ultimate message is surprisingly optimistic: connection matters, friendship matters, maintaining your humanity in the face of inexplicable weirdness matters. In a medium often obsessed with power fantasies and apocalyptic stakes, it dared to suggest that ordinary kids with baseball bats could save the world through courage and caring about each other.
Not bad for something I almost dismissed as too weird to bother with.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
