What is Mother, the 1989 Famicom game?

Mother was released for the Family Computer in Japan on July 27, 1989, published by Nintendo and written and directed by Shigesato Itoi, a famous advertising copywriter making his first game. Ape Inc., the company founded around the project, developed it with programming support from Pax Softnica, and Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka composed the music.

Where other RPGs sent players to a medieval kingdom, Mother opens in 1988 in Podunk, an ordinary American town. Its hero, Ninten, fights lamps, hippies, stray dogs and gang members with a baseball bat, and learns psychic PSI powers instead of magic. The story reaches back to his great-grandparents, George and Maria, and to the alien Giygas, who was raised on Earth and returns at the head of an invasion.

The game's spine is a song. Queen Mary of the dream world Magicant cannot remember the Eight Melodies Maria once sang, and Ninten recovers them note by note from a singing doll, a canary, a piano, a cactus, a dragon and more. Singing the completed melody back is how the final confrontation ends, a structure both sequels would return to.

It sold about 400,000 copies in Japan, the sixth best-selling game of 1989 there, and it stayed a Japanese object for 26 years: Nintendo of America finished an English version in 1990 that never shipped, and the game only reached the West officially in 2015. Its full walkthrough support also lives only in Japanese, in the guidebooks on this shelf, which is why the Japanese box is the one collectors build around.