Official MOTHER 2 Site

Weird. None of my browsers can parse the characters on this page despite being able to on every other Japanese site.

Even if American and European websites for older games are dead for years, Japanese ones still exists. That’s the case for many games, not only EarthBound/Mother 2.

Craigs0r: The site uses Shift_JIS encoding, an earlier standard predating Unicode.

The earliest result on Archive.org’s Wayback Machine for Nintendo.com is this:

http://web.archive.org/web/19961222145141/http://www.nintendo.com/hallway/index.html

Just seems to be for Nintendo Power.

Apparently Nintendo of America had a website as early as 1994, but Archive.org only goes back to 1996…

I wish I could read the text on the site.

The encoding for the text on the website is Shift-JIS, not unicode. Just use the view menu in your browser and change the text/character encoding to Shift JIS and it should work.

YAOMTC is right, use wayback.

This page is *really* outdated by today’s standards. But damn if it was 1994, when the Intern…I mean, World Wide Web was basically a bunch of text here and there.

Gotta love the low res JPEGs of the early internet. And the next/previous game buttons. Were there really so few games that you could feasibly just scroll through ‘em?

There’s a certain charm to old websites like this. Nintendo was probably really proud of having an image with a transparent background. Technology!

I find old websites like this to be immensely fascinating for some reason, in spite of their contents being little more than glorified brochures. I found the old Fire Emblem 3 and 4 ones a while ago (and 5, but that actually had something resembling content); I can’t believe I didn’t think to look for the MOTHER 2 one.

I’ll be cool to do something with this images sometime, not just Mother 2. I just remembered Satellawiel.