How many copies did the Mother games sell?

Mother (1989) sold about 400,000 copies in Japan, making it the sixth best-selling game of 1989 there: a solid hit for a first-time game designer, on a platform crowded with RPGs.

Mother 2 (1994) sold about 518,000 copies in Japan, the tenth best-selling game of its year. EarthBound (1995) sold about 140,000 copies in North America, against a marketing spend of roughly $2 million, and Nintendo treated the launch as a failure; there was no European release at all. Older summaries still circulate a lower Japanese figure near 300,000, but the current sourced accounting, drawn from period Japanese sales data, is the 518,000 used here, for a worldwide total near 658,000.

Mother 3 (2006) sold about 200,000 copies in its first week in Japan and over 368,000 by the end of 2006, a respectable late-life Game Boy Advance performance with no other region to add to it. The Game Boy Advance compilation Mother 1+2 sold about 278,000 in its first year.

Set side by side, the numbers explain the collector market precisely. Japanese copies of all three games are findable because half a million people bought them; the American EarthBound is the scarce object because its expensive, guide-bundled launch is the one that failed.