Tag: SNES

When we think about popular NES titles from the 80’s that eventually evolved into video game series going into the 90’s names such as Super Mario Bros, Metroid, The Legend Of Zelda, Donkey Kong and many others all come to mind. But one few video games that came out for the NES during the 80’s that evolved into a set that does not get talked about too much was Mother 1 which came out in July 1989. For those who do not know Mother 1 was also known as Earthbound Beginnings and was the prequel to the famous Mother 2/Earthbound game from 1994. While Mother 2 from ’94 is considered to be legendary and is critically acclaimed as one of the best 16-bit RPG’s of the 90’s the game did very poorly in sales within the United States. Despite, having a bizarre yet expensive marketing campaign for Mother 2 the game really did not become as popular as Nintendo wanted it to be in America during the mid 90’s. Some would argue that Earthbound for the SNES was not successful in America due to the popularity of emerging game systems within the mid 90’s such as the PS1 and Sega Saturn during that time period.

But at the same time its possible that Earthbound was not as popular in as it should of been because its prequel was a Japanese exclusive for the NES. Ever since ’89 Mother 1 has appeared on the NES and Game Boy Advance exclusively in Japan until ’15 when the game was finally released for the Wii-U worldwide. Some believe that having Mother 1 digitally remastered for the 16-bit SNES between ’91-’93 could have been more effective in making Mother 2 a huge success on the SNES. In fact, the plot for Earthbound took place a decade following the events from Mother 1 which was never officially released outside of Japan during the 90’s. Similar to how Nintendo re-released the first three Mario games for the NES on the Super NES as Super Mario All-Stars in ’93 the company could have done the same thing with the very first mother game at some point. While the plot for Mother 2 was very intriguing one of the biggest issues following its initial release was that the American audience was in the dark regarding the events that took place in the ’89 prequel for the NES. If Nintendo had released a SNES version of the first Mother game during the early 90’s its possible Mother 2 could have been more popular than it ended becoming shortly after its initial release in America.