When did the Mother games come to Nintendo Switch Online?

On February 9, 2022, in a Nintendo Direct, Nintendo added EarthBound to the Nintendo Switch Online SNES library and EarthBound Beginnings to its NES library, available the same day on the standard subscription tier. For players in Europe it was a quiet milestone: EarthBound had first reached them only in 2013, and the series' opening chapter now sat one menu away from its sequel.

The pattern of late releases had been building for a decade. EarthBound's Wii U Virtual Console release on July 18, 2013 was its first re-release anywhere, credited by Satoru Iwata to fan demand on Miiverse, and Beginnings followed on Wii U in 2015. Switch Online simply made the two permanent residents of a subscription shelf.

Mother 3 took the familiar different path. On February 21, 2024, Nintendo added it to the Game Boy Advance library of Nintendo Switch Online plus Expansion Pack, but only in Japan: it appeared in the Japanese Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase that day and in the Japanese GBA app, in Japanese, untranslated. It had previously reached the Japanese Wii U Virtual Console in December 2015, also Japan only.

The result is the series' whole history in one menu: two games the world can open, and a third locked to a Japanese account, thirty years of regional history preserved as a settings choice.