What happened after the Mother 3 fan translation?

The Mother 3 fan translation, released by Starmen.net on October 17, 2008 after roughly two years of work by a team of about a dozen led by professional translator Clyde 'Tomato' Mandelin, was downloaded over 100,000 times in its first week. The project had translated some thousand pages of script and rebuilt the game's code to hold English text; Mandelin has estimated its freelance value at about $30,000 of donated labor.

It kept being maintained like a product. Version 1.1 followed in July 2009, version 1.2 in July 2014, which also released the team's translation tools for other languages, and version 1.3 on April 20, 2021, the game's 15th anniversary, carrying technical fixes by Lorenzooone. A fan translation with a thirteen-year patch history is a publishing record, not an upload.

In April 2013 Mandelin made the offer the project is remembered for: Nintendo could use his translation files for any purpose, completely free; he would edit them, or retranslate from scratch, also free. There is no evidence Nintendo accepted, and Itoi later recounted being told the arrangement 'wasn't quite as simple as that.'

The work also turned into literature and livelihood. Mandelin built Legends of Localization, his long-running study of game translation, with detailed Mother 3 comparison notes and Fangamer-published books on Zelda and EarthBound; Fangamer's Mother 3 Handbook, made alongside the translation, is shelved in this Library's guidebook cluster. The Library's own fan-translation page covers the project's making; this page is its afterlife.