Yes, the impossible has finally happened — the cultiest of cult RPGs, Earthbound, has finally been made available in North America on the Wii U Virtual Console.
Earthbound (or Mother 2 in Japan) was released in America in 1995 and promptly flopped hard, largely due to a weird marketing campaign that focused on strangely scented scratch-and-sniff stickers for some reason. Since then the game has amassed a fanatical western fanbase, and yet up until now Nintendo has refused to re-released the game in North America. Numerous rumors explaining the lack of Earthbound in North America have spread over the years — the most plausible being that Nintendo was uncomfortable with the game’s extensive use of music sampling. Nintendo has never confirmed nor denied any of these rumors.
But hey, those rumors don’t matter now! Hit the jump for an Earthbound trailer and a new mini-Nintendo Direct partly devoted to the game…
Earthbound will run you 10 bucks, which isn’t bad considering the cartridge version regularly sells for over $200. In other words, I’m instituting a zero-tolerance policy for any “10 bucks is too much for a dumb old game” comments.
via Kotaku