Getting People into EarthBound

That’s cool. I should have tried that with my friends, bet they would have liked it too.

I made a nice little package for my 10-year-old sister, for her birthday last year. It had a CD which automatically loaded an emulator to play the game – the CD sleeve had instructions written on it, and there was a separate page with the “words” to the Eight Melodies.

Oddly enough, the CD label itself was almost identical to the CDs shown in the linked article. The only difference was that I used a red MOTHER Earth, and cut off about 1/3 at the bottom to put the “EarthBound” logo (as cut from the title screen) there.

I try fairly hard to get my friends to play it by giving them an emulator, ROM image, and I even gave one guy a USB controller.. but they don’t understand the game. They name the characters all offensive names and don’t like to level up.

Awww, that was so moving. I haven’t done much to make my friends play EB. One of them wanted to coz of Smash. He played EB and M3, but he didn’t enjoy them as much as I did. My other friend has started EB like 20 times and has never finished it (yey) , but he still wants to complete it XD

I tried to get my girlfriend into it. She wasn’t having it. Even though I got her hooked on Animal Crossing and Pokemon. Maybe I should just force feed her some EB goodness!

My usual method to get people to join our little cult involves dressing in my blue blue Happy-Happy Hoodie and clubbing people over the head with bats and frying pans. If that dosen’t work, I kidnap them and sing the eight melodies in their ear until they jjjoooiiiiiinnnnn uuuuusssss……

This hasn’t worked too well in the past, as I am currently on the run from the police for kidnapping and assault. Cheers.

Wow, I told my good pal about EarthBound when I got it off of ebay, and when he heard the main character was Ness from Smash Brothers, he went crazy, and got into the EarthBound hype like me, and he even started drawing the characters, and everyday, he asks me how far I’ve gotten in EarthBound, even without knowing about the game he got into it so quickly. And by the way, I feel your pain Steak, there are some people out there who just can’t appreciate a good RPG

@Hejiru: LOL xDDDDD

Well, I made my brother play Mother 2, but he finished it too quick and didn’t enjoy the game as much as I did… I hate when that happens, because he won’t know why EB is so great T^T

Why, yes.
I’ve got a few friends at school into EarthBound.
I have also made half the members of a forum I go to play one of the games from the series, and they love it.

I tried to show my father EarthBound, I might as well of tried to teach a brink arithmatic. He hated the battles and just didn’t get it. I thought he’d like it because we play a lot of adventure games togeather, but I guess RPGs are a different breed.

Not exactly legal, but it’s nice, haha.

These printed disks are awesome!

I’ve told probably about 10 friends or so to play the game (it probably came close to begging lol). Most of the time they didn’t pay much attention but a few of them played the game and loved it.

*reading comments*
oh, phew. I was worried that posting this article would spawn a riot at my front door or something.

@Fooboo05: That’s about what I was doing before I decided to make the CDs. Why beg when you can give, or something like that. ;D

I’ve tried to get many of my friends into it, but most of them start a file and then put it on the backburner for a long time.

One of my friends has had a save file in Cave of the Past for the past three months. He hasn’t seen Giygas yet.

no one i know in real life knows anything about emulators. i tried a lot in the later 90s to get some friends into it by lending out my cart all over the place but none of the friends ever got too far.

i did manage to get my brother to play it. he played all the way through it but now claims to not remember anything about the game

My cousin got his group of friends into EarthBound for a while, but I don’t know if they’re still into it or not.

I hit people until they agree to play EarthBound.

I have already spread Mother 3 to one person, yes, they are addicted.

yesterday i saw a place called “three d cleaners” and i was automaticaly saying threed cleaners. the owners might be eb fans trying to hide it if not why woulldn’t you just call it 3-D claeners

I’m trying to get my friend hooked on the Mother games. Sadly, all he knows is from Smash Brothers. Which means scince Nintendo decided not to make more than about 1 word’s mention of Giygas and Mother3, all my friend knows is basicly easy knowledge to me.

I did something similar to this. I gave my friend a disc with lots of ROMs/emulators I thought he would like. (A lot of Fire Emblem mainly)

I put Earthbound on it too, and he didn’t like it because the battle system was too simple, and didn’t allow for battle animation or something like that. He barely gave the game a chance in my opinion.

this isn’t exactly illegal, it’s just in a gray area, because they didn’t sell them, they gave them away, and it was just for their friends’ personal use. since you can’t play mother 3 without pirating it and earthbound is expensive(plus the cost of an snes if you don’t have one), this isn’t really much worse than if you pirate it normally. although you are tricking someone into playing a pirated game XD

in a trip to see family:
-i convinced my grandma that some videogames are great and funny and not at all bad
-i got my aunt interested in the storyline of mother 3 by describing parts of it (including the ending) in detail (she’s an extreme science fiction fan, her daughter played with star trek action figures as a small child instead of dolls)
-i mentioned it to a different aunt, but she wasn’t so interested
-i showed off my plushies to a ton of relatives and played music from the games on the piano for them, and showed off some of my art

also, sometime soon i plan to get a friend to play mother 3 because i played gentle rain for a school concert, and we’re both in band so she heard me play it, and she absolutely fell in love with that song. so sometime i will show her the game and hopefully she’ll like it. i was going to today, but we were going to meet at the library after school and she didn’t show up.

When I was 13 I got EarthBound and I used to let my friends borrow my SNES so they could play it. About six people have at one point had my EB cart in their smelly hands. I’ve been trying to get my friend Matt into the game for 13 years but the dude is a terrible listener, haha.

Basically anyone who is very close to me has either beaten EB on my cart, or has gotten into emulation as a result of my nerd-nagging. Each and every one of them (even those who don’t really like games) absolutely loved it. If only Nintendo could realize the staying power of this neat little series… it truly captures people’s hearts.

I’ve tried to get some friends interested in the series, but they don’t seem to like it. Some have actually played it and just didn’t like it, which is understandable. But I always get annoyed seeing someone who doesn’t even try the game and dislike it.

I even had one friend who had never even touched the game and hate it! Although, he later turned out to not being much of a friend at all. But still.

Eh, I tried at least.

For Christmas last year, I bought several re-writable GBA flash carts (the kind with 32MB internal memory, not the SD card kind), put Mother 3 on each of them, got labels printed, and made gift boxes that look like the ones from EarthBound.

Today, almost a year later, all of them said they liked the game a lot but none of them have beat it.

I ain’t got no money this year, but there are a few more people I want to try to convert next year, and hopefully I’ll have the Mother 1 GBA translation to give them by then!

None of my friends or relatives play old school rpgs except a cousin who’s into the portable Dragon Quest/Warrior games.

@mntorankusu
Hey… have you ever thought about giving those to people who have already converted? aka… me?

Since the fan-translation launch, i have spread the word about MOTHER 3 to almost everyone online who i think would like the game much as i do.
Most people enjoyed it and are really thankful, as i am.

I tried to show Earthbound to an older friends kids. (A boy aged 9 and a girl aged 11.) The boy stuck with me but the girl was incredulous. “What’s the point?” she said. This was coming from a girl who was no stranger to 2d games or RPGs thanks to the nintendo ds. I wasn’t happy with that answer. “What’s the point to any game?” I said. Mario jumps on turtles, Link collects rupees and Samus turns into a rolling ball that lays bombs. You play until it’s over. Why was Earthbound so hard to swallow? I think that the modern setting that I appreciate so much might be lost on younger players with a lot of exposure to current games. We’re getting old…

I have some gamer friends I’ve been trying to get to play EB for years. And they’re big into RPGs too, but they like the SERIZ BIDINEZ RPGs like FF, and I hate those kind of RPGs. So I made a bet with one of them, the last person to finish their assigned game (he got eb, I got FF4 DS) had to play another game from the series (I think I would have to play FF3 DS and he’d play M3). 3 years later, I just started playing FF4 (and oh, how I hate it) and he hasn’t even started.

I got a friend to play Mother 3.
I remember the friend IMing me a few hours later upset about a certain early scene in the game. As the friend named the character after a maternal family member. *ahemtryingtoavoidspoilersahemcoughyoushouldalsoknowhichscenecoughachooifnot,shameonyou,shaaame,on,yooou.achoo*

Aside from that, I believe he got as far as the Natural Killer Cyborg and then stopped. :/

@ lrz

Dude, I’m barely older than either of them and I love these frikin’ games!

I played mother 3 and managed to spread my enthusiasm for the game to one other person. We both cleared the game! I’m not exactly sure what he thought about the game, never really asked, but since he cleared it i guess he liked it at least. We both agreed on that the barrier trio’s final attack was the coolest thing in the game, though!

I would have a hard time spreading M3 on now… the only reason i even finished the game was because it was a mother series game, i _forced_ myself to play through the entire game.

Earthbound, on the other hand, was just fun to play all the way through, of what i can remember. I could recommend it to anyone.

(and yes… i like “,”‘s…)

Just based on reading some of these posts it gots me to start the thinking… has there ever been a poll on the age of the Mother series fans? I’m not sure if I’ve asked this before? That would be a pretty good poll! *Wink* *Wink*

When I was in High School, a friend of mine and I used to emulate in the school library when we had a free period. Since we both had VBA, we traded: I gave him a copy of Mother 3 and he gave me a copy of Link’s Awakening DX. I don’t think either of us has ever played the games we gave each other…

Other guy in the same place saw me playing Earthbound once and he said, I quote “I think is retarded!”. Yeah, he only cared about his dear Pokemon on the DS (don’t get me wrong, I like Pokemon. A lot. I name my Pokemon after Mother characters, though…).

Lastly, the librarian’s assistant himself knew about Earthbound. He had a copy of Mother 3 and VBA, but didn’t have the patch and couldn’t play it because he had a Mac.

It’s so hard to find gamers around here in California…

Well, from where I’m from, you’ll be lucky to get anyone into an old classic.

Always. I always suggest MOTHER to people who like gaming. I’ve gotten about 3 people from my school to play MOTHER 3, they thought they’d hate it, and loved it.

I think I actually should try beating them myself before trying to refer others to it.

I’ve tried Earthbound many times but something always seems to happen to my save and I have to start over. The farthest I got was Tenda Village.

I somehow forced my friend to play it. She is now the biggest, craziest Jeff fangirl to have ever lived. She got stuck in Magicant and her computer ate her file, though, so she didn’t finish. I’ve been trying to get her to play Mother 3 since with no luck.

I’m already leaning towards no but I’ll ask anyway. Do you think if I put the games on a SD card they would work on the DSi?

I’ve always wanted to try something like this; Just stuff all the Earthbound/Mother goodness and stuff it into a disk. Maybe i’ll make some kind of pack with all this on it plus a sticker or something. Some kind of splashscreen.

@Deraj626
No, at least not until the folks at HackMii.com crack the DSi’s safeguards… and they will eventually.

I sort of got my roommate into Earthbound by showing him the fight with Giygas. Yeah it’s spoilertastic, but it sparked some interest I guess haha.

I can never get any of my friends to play any mother games because most of them are FPS fanboys! XD

ever since i found mother 3 just browsing the internet i was hooked. i finally found a rom for it and a guide that told me what was happening, sorta. i found the fan translation site and was so happy i could see some of it in english with the menu patch. i beat the game. about a year later the full translation came out and i was ecstatic. the game was even more fun in english and all of the witty humor from earthbound (that i had played and beaten over the year) was also in it.
i have constantly tried to show my friends the awesomeness of this game but none of them will play it. one of my friends just hates nintendo and criticizes every aspect about it (mostly because his brother broke his gameboy color when he was younger) and makes fun of me when i’m playing it.

I’ve never been able to get anyone into the EB scene. I really don’t they would be able to grasp the true form the series anyway…

i tried geting my friend in to mother all he did was laugh at me and said”MOTHER?! WTF what a stupid name”
i slapped him afterwards

My girlfriend wants to play the game, but she keeps making stupid excuses like,”My mom keeps deleting the ROM” or “Me internet is broken”(Yet she mysteriously has email…) I show it to my friends to show them what interests me, I even tried to get a friend on deviantART to try and play it, but he said that he was against illegal emulation and wasn’t interested anyways. Jerk.

Yeah it’s a shame that people dont usually want to get into the mother series, I love all the games, but let’s face it, its not exactly the most normal RPG to START people off on, the games are pretty odd in plot, characters and occasionally the background music itself, and just because you and me get past the weirdness doesn’t mean newbies will. I say work them into some other RPGs before getting into mother.

And also @ Dr. Hobo, I prefer Mother 3 over FF 4 any day, but how can you hate the game, there’s a tonne of emotion and an interesting story, I think you’re a little TOO obsessed with mother, try branching out.

this page and Mato’s effort to make the patch off the mother 1+2 made me want to play the game really bad, so yeah im about to start playin mother, the 3 games in order…

wish me luck xD

You know how they never released Earthbound in EU? I sent my friend in the UK a CD with the Emulator and rom printed on it. I also sent him a page with instructions on how to load it up on his computer and run the ROM. He is a Mother/EB fan, but he had never heard of emulators or anything and he didn’t wanna pay $100.00 for a cart… =D

Once i find a white trench coat, Big black Belt, Blacksmiths gloves, Cape, and make a helmet (I already have boots )

I am SO gonna be a Pigmask Colonel and March around recruiting, not just to play the game, but maybe an organization devoted to discussing the game’s meaning and helping the cause, as Itoi stated the more you think about it, the better it gets, Plus that means if Polls including MOTHER show up anywhere, we can support the series.

Plus we could help donate to other organizations and maybe get some attention on the news!
But the costumes are so difficult to create, green trench coats are easy to find, but pink and blue are impossible, any suggestions as to possible Pigmask coats anyone?

I made a CD for one of my friends like the ones pictured here for Christmas. I don’t know if he actually enjoyed it, but when I went over to his house he seemed to like it a lot. I wonder how far he’s gotten?

i got one of my chums into it by showing him the uc and master barf

If only I could, I tried to get My sisters or pretty much anyone I could to watch Me play through the game and I ask if they’d like to play it. Well My youngest sister’s ex-boyfriend’s friend took a look thought it was cool but didn’t stay long. My youngr sister (middle child well we’re all close in age so they’re not much younger I’m the oldest but don’t act like it and I only have two younger sisters) only watchs for a short while and doesn’t really want to or have any time to play it.

She really doesn’t want to play it either,and has no interest in learning about anything about Ness or Lucas past them as fighters in the Smash bros. series.

My little sister doesn’t want to play it and is not interested in it either, in fact when she wants to know something about the game she’d rather I spoil what happens next rather than watch Me play sometimes or play for herself like the one time I played Mother 3 and she was like “NO! Just tell Me” which is hypocritical as when she tells Me when I want to find out something to just watch it.

The two of them don’t like the way it looks how you play one being that they are just sprites that stand still and only the background moves during battle and they’re turn-based instead of realtime like their precious Tales of series. And they haven’t even played the game and have already judged it. I at least played in a battle in co-op when they were playing Tales of Symphonia (which My youngest sister believes has a sadder story than Mother 3 and they’ve always prefered anmie cliches) with them before I stopped since it switched out characters. The two of them have not touched Earthbound or Mother 3.
My younger sister (middle child) also was playing Tales of Vesperia and also prefers that, but currently she was playing boarderlands before their computer was sent in to be fixed.

They only catch glimpes of the game when they are eating and I am at the computer.

They’ve just never been into it and without even watching much of it or playing it at all. They simply judge just by looking at it.

It kind of made Me sad when My youngest sister’s ex-boyfriend’s friend was talking about Mr. Saturn and how he would turn them to the only item in Smash Bros. and then I played the Duane and Brando song but I was the only one who knew anything about Mr. Saturn past Smash Bros. and My sister and My youngest sister’s ex-boyfriend’s friend knew nothing of the refferences in the video or anything past Smash Bros. about them and I had to explain the stuff as the video played.

I’ve even tried to get My Mother to watch but since shes gone so much to work to support us and is so busy all day or sleeping in (My father died when I was barely starting hiogh school so these are the reasons) she never has time to. I mean I at least think she’d get the pop culture refferences but I don’t think she’ll ever have time to.

Ugh it gets rather annoying being the only one in the entire home whos into this series and the only one who knows Ness and Lucas better and doesn’t just know them as “those two kids that are in Super Smash Bros.” but it seems its going to stay that way for Me.

I was talking to my friend. I said I know which game lucas and ness come from in brawl. He asked where. “The Earthbound/mother series. “whats that? He asked. I said a trilogy wih 1 made in anywhere but japan. which one wasnt in japan he asked. I said earthbound also known as mother2. It was made here.
He asked how do you know this stuff? “I said studying you should try it. He said ok and the next day he became a fan.

my sister took a look at earthbound while i was doing the boring old sword of kings grind and said it looked stupid and boring (1/128 item grinding IS boring).
i should bet her like 20 bucks to play through earthbound and see if she likes it.

if not, i’ve been starting to motion my friend toward the series. he doesn’t know much about EB and M3 but doesn’t just base all his facts off SSBB. I should do the whole M3 disc thing. (Not EB cause i have parental controls and i play EB on a SNES)

Over the past year, I’ve got my internet friend into Mother 3 after he knew nothing about the series. He’s already ordered it on eBay and waiting for it to arrive.