What was the Secret of MOTHER 2 exhibition?

In summer 2024, for the 30th anniversary of Mother 2's August 1994 release, Hobonichi hosted The Secret of MOTHER 2 at its gallery space in Shibuya PARCO, Tokyo: an exhibition of the game's development materials, the sketches, documents and production artifacts of a game whose making had never been publicly displayed at this scale.

The show's quiet headline was clay. The guidebook clay figurines, stored since the 1990s, were brought out for the exhibition, their first public appearance in thirty years and the direct prelude to 2025's complete showing at MOTHER no Katachi.

A 320-page commemorative book drawn from the exhibition followed, carrying the development material into print, the Project's habit of turning every act of preservation into a shelveable object.

Anniversary exhibitions are common in Japanese games; what distinguishes this one is the exhibitor. The archive of Mother 2 is curated by Hobonichi, the company Shigesato Itoi built after the games, which makes the Project less a licensee's celebration than the author's own attic, opened.