Super Smash Bros. For the 64. I was reading about him in the Char Bios. Curiosity led me down the path into digital darkness. The darkness is good. It feeds my gamer soul...

I played SSB at my friends house and I always wondered who Ness was, then I found out a year later when I heard about Mother 3.

Really, I just sort of found out about Earthbound.

I nabbed a couple of roms and an emulator offa' some sight 6 or so years back, and within the group of games was Earthbound.
I tried it out and have been loving it since.

But you know what I'd love more?
Finding a cheap, working SNES cart for Earthbound someplace relatively close to me.
Sadly, when you live in the middle of nowhere, that's kind of difficult to do...

Well, at least I can dream.

count me in as another suckered in by the giant box.

the local rental place would have the game box on display, with the various rental cartridges in clear plastic boxes behind it. the earthbound box was so big it didn't really fit on the shelves, so it was kind of wedged in at a weird angle. then when that rental place sold their copy i bought my own (for $10, for all you people lusting after cartridges now. also came with player's guide)

A couple years ago, Game Informer had a two-page article on Earthbound as part of some retro gaming-article-series-thing they were doing.... They talked about the photographer saying "fuzzy pickles," and how you beat enemies with bats instead of the usual magical crap.... Besides Super Mario RPG, I was never an RPG fan, but I thought this game I had never heard of sounded HILARIOUS!

I still have my SNES that I got when I was young (my mom bought it on the day it came out, no less), but at the time I didn't have a job, so I downloaded an emulator and a ROM I got as far as the part where you first arrive in Threed before realizing I HAD to get an actual cartridge

Got a job a few weeks later, found a copy at a local game store for $89.99, dusted off the 'ol SNES, and played through the game a couple times so far.... Still lovin' it!

hahah great. move, and I understand what you mean. you need the cart to enjoy this game to the max. emulation is an insult to the magic that is the game.

well actully a freind of mine who is on this forum (mr.saturn) got into the serise so i tried it and it was an awesome game

Story time!

One Summer day, my brother was escorted into Blockbuster by my mother. After sliding through the glass doors and making a sharp turn into the VIDEO GAMES section, he was presented with an eyeful of potentially awesome games. One unit on the shelf stood above the rest though. Quite literally. Laying eyes upon this ENOURMOUS beast of a box, he knew... "I WANT THIS ONE!" he proclaimed. Finally returning to our residence, and putting an end to the taunting of having to stare at the game during the entire car ride back, he slapped that beautiful piece of plastic into the Super Nintendo, slid the magical empowerment switch up into the ON position, picked up the handheld input device, and called my sister and I over. After a couple of logos which none of us at the time could care any less for, we laid eyes and ears upon the most impactful title screen the human race has ever seen! And there began an amazing adventure full of fighting over the PLAYER 1 controller, and not knowing that one of us could have been using the PLAYER 2 controller to help in battle.

So it's all thanks to that big box. Nintendo made one good marketing decision with EarthBound.

I tried out Earthbound back in the day, but I wasn't into any sort of RPG really. I couldn't even beat Frank
BUT, on one of my rounds of "reading about video games on Wikipedia" I stumbled upon the Japan-only sequel Mother 3. It said a little bit about how the entire game was hacked/translated into English, and that made me think "This game must be AWESOME if someone is willing to go through all that work, for free, to bring the game to a larger audience."
Sure enough, when I played it I became a huge fan.

I played SSBM but didn't really think much of Ness, because I didn't know who Mr. Game & Watch, Ganondorf, or Captain Falcon either. I read some of the trophies and got the impression that he was from a Japanese game. Years later Brawl was in production and regular updates were being made when I stumbled across a thread at http://www.gamespot.com/wii/puzzle/wiic ... abs;forums (which used to have a lot more threads). Many people were complaining about some game called Earthbound not being on the VC, and one topic was called some thing like "Earthbound Supporters". In that thread, some people were telling this one guy that starmen.net had already done all they could to get EB on the VC, and that his thread was pointless. I went to starmen.net and soon got an interest in Earthbound. I put it at the top of my birthday wishlist, but when my birthday came I didn't get it. So I went and bought it off ebay for $70. And thats how I found out about Earthbound