What is EarthBound Beginnings?

EarthBound Beginnings is the Western name of Mother, released for the Wii U Virtual Console in North America on June 14, 2015, announced the same day during the Nintendo World Championships at E3. It was the first official English release of the game, 26 years after the Japanese original.

What Nintendo released is remarkable for what it is not. It is not a remake, a remaster or a fresh translation: it is the unaltered ROM of Earth Bound, the English version Nintendo of America completed in September 1990 under localization lead Phil Sandhop and then shelved as the NES era ended. The run button, the rebalanced encounters, the softened imagery and the expanded ending the prototype added are all there, because the prototype itself is there.

The name was chosen to place the game in sequence: Beginnings marks it as the prequel to EarthBound, the name the second game had carried in the West since 1995, a small act of shelf organization for a series America received out of order.

Beginnings later joined Nintendo Switch Online's NES library on February 9, 2022, alongside EarthBound on the SNES app, putting the first two games one menu apart at last. The third, as ever, stayed in Japan.