What is the EarthBound Handbook?

The EarthBound Handbook: Travel Eagleland the EarthBound Way, published by Fangamer in 2016, is a 260-page companion that returns to the conceit of the 1995 Player's Guide: the game's world presented as a place you could actually visit, with the traveler, not the speedrunner, as its reader.

It exists because of a crowdfunding record. In 2014 Fangamer's You Are Now EarthBound Kickstarter sought $100,000 to produce the handbook alongside the EarthBound, USA documentary, a zine and an album box set; it raised over $230,000. The backers were not buying nostalgia in the abstract: they were prepaying for print objects about a game that had sold 140,000 copies nineteen years earlier.

Paired with the Mother 3 Handbook of 2009, it completes a strange bibliographic fact: the two most substantial English guidebooks in this series' history are unofficial, fan-made, and produced decades after the games, while the official English documentation remains the single 1995 pack-in guide.

For the shelf, the Handbook is the modern anchor of the American EarthBound print line, and its Kickstarter total is the cleanest single measure of what the series' audience became.