How much did EarthBound cost when it came out?

EarthBound reached North American shelves on June 5, 1995 at $69.95, a high price for a Super Nintendo game, and the reason was physical: every copy shipped in an oversized box containing the 128-page EarthBound Player's Guide. The guide was not a bonus; it was the manual, the map and the marketing, and buyers paid for all of it at the register.

In Japan the same game had launched on August 27, 1994 as Mother 2 at ¥9,800 (about $99 at the time), a normal premium Super Famicom price in a standard-sized box, with its official guidebook sold separately by Shogakukan.

Retrospective accounts of EarthBound's weak American sales, about 140,000 copies against roughly 518,000 in Japan, regularly cite the package price as one of the drags: a strange-looking RPG asking top dollar from an audience that had never heard of it. Nintendo's roughly $2 million marketing campaign, built on the slogan This Game Stinks, did the rest.

The price history explains the modern shelf. The expensive 1995 package sold poorly, which is why complete American copies are scarce objects today, while the ordinarily priced Japanese release sold half a million and remains the affordable way to own the game in its original form.