Well, when I discovered the dark art of emulation there was a slew of SNES games I wanted to try. EarthBound was part of that slew, and around two weeks of be enveloped by it's quirkiness I would be forever hooked. I had already knew of the games history with it really being MOTHER 2 and all, but never took the time to play it up until that point. This was around a year and one month ago.

My brother and I were in a GameStop about 5 years ago and he pulls out this colorful SNES game cartridge from the rack they had. He was like, "Dude, we have to get this." I had twenty dollars and he had ten and the game itself was thirty. Now, in that store, you could have gotten an SNES game for about five or ten dollars, so for it to be a thirty dollar game, it had to be good, right? Well, long story short, I made the right choice. Looking back, I'm glad I got it for thirty instead of eighty or something insane like that.

Me and my childhood friend rented the game one weekend and he played through most of it. He told me it was a great game and that he once played through it before. I was a little frightened by the Poo meditation battle, it just disturbed me for some odd reason. The game was tons of fun to just watch and my friend got pretty far before we had to return it. He told me that you beat the last boss by praying... I thought that was kind of weird as a child.

Y'know, I don't really know how I came across it. I think it might've had to do with Super Smash Bros., but I somehow stumbled on Starmen.net, and the rest is history.

History well-spent no doubt!

History is not currency.

A friend told me about it - he didn't give much info about the game, just that I had to get it, so I looked up the Wikipedia article - it seemed pretty cool, so I downloaded the ROM.(Piracy is wrong, kids! But $80+ is way out of my league) I took a while to start playing it, though, as I was playing Bioshock for the PS3 - but when I finally did, I was hooked.
Sadly, the aforementioned friend is now an ex-friend, and we barely speak to each other - but I'm glad I found out about the game, as I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, only when I've actually been wanting to find Earthboundy stuff. There have been a few references in various Nintendo magazines, but not many due to the fact Earthbound was never released in the UK.

The game's relative obscurity isn't necessarily a bad thing though, because IMO it makes it more special if you like something only a few other people have heard of.

And, in case he ever reads this post...Thanks, Neil. You were right about EB being awesome.

I remember around 1996 when I went to a store with my brother and dad and found Earthbound in a huge box and looked at the back of the box and my brother said "this game looks gay" then when smash bros came out we got Ness and we read about him on the game. then we got internet and found out about earthbound.

I was 5 years old at the time.
I was just given a SNES as a gift, and a large pile of games.

Of all the games in the stack, I saw Earthbound. I thought it sounded cool, so I put it into my SNES.
I was young at the time, and so I did not fully get what I was doing. I used "Auto" a lot of th time and I had a lot of trouble getting to the end of the game.

I was 6 years old at the time. I was so scared of Giygas. I could never beat him. Until one day, I hit pray. I kept hitting Pray when I saw the effects of it. I beat Giygas that day. And that was the day I picked up my second SNES game.

I heard about it from some cool cat named, NarutoNU.