Why did EarthBound take so long to come back?

The absence was conspicuous from the start. When Nintendo launched the Wii Virtual Console in 2006, IGN expected EarthBound to be among its highest priorities, given the dedication of its fanbase. Nintendo Power readers ranked it the most desired Virtual Console release. The ESRB rated it. By the reporting of the time, it could have been published with little effort. The Wii version never came. Year after year, one of Nintendo's most requested games simply was not on the service built for it.

The popular explanation filled the silence: the soundtrack. EarthBound's music quotes and samples a century of pop, and fans widely believed that licensing problems involving artists such as the Beatles and Chuck Berry had frozen the game. The reference record captions that belief plainly: fans incorrectly suspected it. English localizer Marcus Lindblom doubted the samples were ever an issue, noting they had not been a concern during development, and offered his own hypothesis instead, that Nintendo did not realize the scale of the game's support and never made it a priority. That hypothesis is Lindblom's, printed here as his. No Nintendo statement has ever blamed the music.

What Nintendo did credit, on the record, was the fans. In late 2012 Itoi revealed the rerelease was moving forward, and a January 2013 Nintendo Direct confirmed it. The game returned in Japan in March 2013 as part of anniversary celebrations for the NES and Mother 2, and Nintendo president Satoru Iwata then announced the worldwide release, citing the fan response on Nintendo's Miiverse platform. It launched in America and Europe in July 2013, eighteen years after the cartridge, complete with a free online recreation of the original Player's Guide. It became a top seller on the Wii U Virtual Console, and first time players, per Kotaku's reporting, responded overwhelmingly positively.

The comeback then reached backward. The original Mother had been fully localized for North America back in 1989 and then shelved as commercially nonviable; a finished prototype later surfaced and circulated among fans as EarthBound Zero. On June 14, 2015, twenty years after EarthBound's American launch and twenty six after the Famicom original, Nintendo released it worldwide as EarthBound Beginnings. EarthBound itself followed to the New Nintendo 3DS in 2016 and the SNES Classic in 2017, although Japan's version of that console, pointedly, did not include it. In February 2022 both games arrived worldwide on the Nintendo Classics service. The series that took eighteen years to come back now sits one subscription away. Only Mother 3 is still missing.