THE LIBRARY

518,000 sold in Japan against roughly 140,000 in America, despite a two million dollar campaign built on a joke about smell.

It arrived in April 2006 as the Game Boy Advance died, and Nintendo's on-record answer was that it just did not make business sense.

No single blocker kept it away. Iwata credited the fans on Miiverse for the 2013 return, and Beginnings followed in 2015.

The Player's Guide was packed inside in place of a manual. Mother 2's red box is the other half of the pair.

Shigesato Itoi's 1989 RPG of modern America: baseball bats, psychic children, a shelved American version, and the 2015 return as EarthBound Beginnings.

The 1989 album that turned a Famicom score into English pop songs, sung in London by a fourteen year old and the choir of St Paul's Cathedral.

Three games, two countries, one red wordmark: the Japanese and American boxes for Mother, EarthBound, and Mother 3 side by side, with the histories and questions behind them.

Ape and HAL's 1994 sequel: Ness and the eight Sanctuaries, the five year making, the American flop, and the classic it became.

Lucas and the Nowhere Islands: twelve years, four consoles, a cancelled 3D version, and the 2006 Game Boy Advance game Japan kept.

Starmen.net's two year volunteer localization of Mother 3, led by professional translator Clyde Mandelin: 1,000 pages of script, 100,000 downloads in a week.

Shigesato Itoi has answered for a decade, in his own words: making a fourth Mother is, as he put it, totally impossible.

The 3D Mother 3 died in August 2000. Miyamoto blamed the GameCube's claim on the team, Iwata blamed himself, and Itoi published the whole conversation.

Red crosses off hospitals, bars turned into cafes, a band redrawn to avoid a lawsuit: Mother 2 became EarthBound under Nintendo of America's 1990s content rules.

Itoi traced the final battle's dialogue to a film scene he walked into as a child and misunderstood. The fetus theory, he never said: the record, separated.

Shigesato Itoi's 1989 Famicom RPG: a modern American town, a boy with a baseball bat, psychic powers, and a melody hidden in eight places.

There is no Western Mother box. The 1989 Japanese box, black space, a small Earth and the red MOTHER logo, is the only box this game ever had.

EarthBound's Japanese name is a subtitle with a promise: Mother 2 carries Giygas in its title, and its red Japanese box sold for ¥9,800 in 1994.

EarthBound launched at $69.95 in America in 1995, priced like the big box it was, while Mother 2 sold in Japan for ¥9,800, about $99 at the time.

Mother 3's Japanese box turns its own logo into an object: the title carved in wood and steel, sold April 20, 2006 for ¥4,800, about $41 at the time.

A limited ¥18,000 box from April 2006: the game, an all-red Mother 3 Game Boy Micro, and a Franklin Badge pin. About $151 at the time.

Both Famicom and Super Famicom games on one GBA cartridge, June 20, 2003 in Japan, and the version where the lost English prototype quietly survives.

The name Nintendo gave Mother in the West at last: the unreleased 1990 English version, issued untouched on Wii U on June 14, 2015.

A $125 find, a $400 fan-funded loan to copy it, and an April 1998 release that gave the cancelled game its name: the best document in NES collecting.

February 9, 2022 put EarthBound and Beginnings on Switch worldwide. Mother 3 followed on February 21, 2024, in the Japanese app only.

About 400,000 for Mother, 518,000 in Japan for Mother 2 against 140,000 in America, and over 368,000 for Mother 3: modest numbers, enormous shadow.