What is Mother 1+2 for Game Boy Advance?

Mother 1+2, released in Japan on June 20, 2003 at ¥4,800 (about $41 at the time), puts the 1989 Mother and the 1994 Mother 2 on a single Game Boy Advance cartridge. Nintendo released it to rebuild the series' audience, and its television commercial ended with the news fans had waited a decade for: Mother 3 was in development for the GBA. The compilation sold about 278,000 copies in its first year in Japan.

The Mother 1 half carries a secret. Nintendo of America's finished but unreleased 1990 localization of Mother had added a run button, rebalanced encounters, softened some imagery and written an expanded ending that the Japanese original ran out of time to include. Mother 1+2 keeps many of those changes, the run button and the full epilogue among them, presented in Japanese. The cancelled American version's work survives inside the Japanese cartridge, and that survival later helped prove the leaked prototype cartridge was genuine.

Mother 2's half is a faithful portable conversion of the Super Famicom game, developed with Pax Softnica's involvement, squeezed onto the handheld with a smaller screen resolution that slightly crops the view.

The compilation was never localized, so the West's first official Mother 1 remained nine years away. For collectors it is the essential bridge object: both original games, one cartridge, and the paper trail of the prototype folded inside.