Trivia / EarthBound (1994)

• Approval of God: Shigesato Itoi called this EarthBound tribute video amazing.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Giygas sometimes says "I'm happy" or "I feel good" during the battle with him, but he never said "I feel happy".
• Colbert Bump: The game's initial release was without that much fanfare, and it mostly went unnoticed (which helped to contribute to the cartridge's current rarity). Four years later, though...
• Creator Breakdown: Shigesato Itoi admitted that Giygas was inspired by trauma brought on by watching the film The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty as a child. The developers, when typing in the dialog Itoi wanted Giygas to say, were reportedly brought to tears by the traumatic experience.
• Development Hell: It went through a shorter but just as dangerous version of the trope. The developers struggled to make progress on the game even four years into its development, as it was riddled with bugs and was nowhere near completion. Enter HAL Laboratories president and future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who started the game's programming over from scratch, fixing most of the team's problems in a month, and completing its development altogether in just six months. The main caveat of this though is that the game's programming is written in a very unorthodox language, with the coding for the in-game text alone probably being complex enough to program an emulator with.
• Dummied Out:
  • The usual selection of unused sprites per SNES RPG standards; a variety of sprites exist that require situations that cannot legitimately exist in game. Most interesting among these is a ghost sprite for Everdred, implying that either he really did die in the alley or he was intended to join the party at some point.
  • Unused music, most of which was variants on existing music.
  • An unused item, the Video Relaxant (Japanese: Video Drug). Does nothing, but the name is highly suggestive. Another unused probable key item exists in code as well.
  • An impossible to (legitimately) achieve ending to a scripted boss fight, the Clumsy Robot. If you could somehow reach it without meeting the Runaway Five, the boss would just erupt in smoke instead of the usual ending.
  • Although regional differences are numerous, relatively few sprites were dummied, but instead altered. Even the infamous "naked Ness" in Magicant is redrawn to be identical to pajama Ness rather than left unused in the data.
• Follow the Leader: The Tengai Makyou series, which shares this series's offbeat humour, with hilarious writings, taking place in a fictional Japan based on exaggerated conceptions by the west. The fourth one even takes place in a fictional America, with hilarious results. The first game appeared after MOTHER in 1989. Unlike that game, it never lost its No Export for You status.
• God Never Said That: The names of most songs in the game. While some tracks—such as Humoresque of a Little Dog^note the shop theme, or Smiles and Tears^note the credits theme—do have official names, most of the names commonly attributed to the game's music tracks are purely fan inventions… hence why "Battle Against a Machine" plays against multiple opponents that are either implicitly or explicitly not mechanical in nature, for example.
• He Also Did: The rock guitar heard in several parts of the game is played by M. D. Seegar. You know him better by his real name, Shigeru Miyamoto.
• Incidental Multilingual Wordplay: A sign in Threed advertising a hint shop features a pun based on the cry of a horse that works in both English and Japanese. One of the locals in Onett also tells you a pun on "Alps no Shoujo ___ji" (Hai/Iie) in the Japanese version, or "A Beatles Song, ___terday" (Yes/No) in the English version.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: One of the most infamous and bemoaned examples in gaming, due to a mix of the game's commercial failure in the US and the copious use of Epileptic Flashing Lights for PSI attacks, which were too voluminous to manually adjust. As a result, fans had to content themselves with a ROM of the game or track down an original cartridge — which, due to intense demand and limited supply, usually didn't (and still don't) go for less than $200 outside of garage sales and such. (That price usually means the cartridge itself, too.) Finally averted by the 2013 release for the Virtual Console (which uses a real-time blur filter to dull PSI effects). This is even lampshaded by Nintendo's press release, which says "You are not dreaming - This is Real".
• Killer App:
  • Not in its initial release, but many people — fans of the series or not — considered buying a Wii U (and later an SNES Classic) for the sake of its Virtual Console port.
• Late Export for You: The game didn't see release in Europe until 2013, nearly 20 years after its Japanese and North American releases.
• Manual Misprint: The Gutsy Bat is a Rare Drop from the Bionic Kraken, not the regular Kraken as printed in the official guide packaged with the game. The official guide also listed the Broken Antenna (repaired to become Jeff's strongest weapon) as the "Broken Parabolic" found in a gift box, location unknown; in reality it's a rare 1/128 drop from Uncontrollable Spheres.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": Ness was playable in three Smash Bros. games before EarthBound was released in Europe's Virtual Console. He doesn't have as many spoilers as Lucas does, though.
• Newbie Boom: The fandom got a sudden surge of new members when the game finally got rereleased on the Wii U. At one point it was the most downloaded Virtual Console game on the Wii U, which resulted in many new comers to the series, with some being people who likely never heard of the game at that point. This has notably caused some friction between those who were in the cult fandom before it gained a wider audience, thanks to the fact that these newer audiences were either unaware of or weren't ingrained into the game's prior status as a Sacred Cow, leading to a good deal of Hype Backlash from people who were expecting the game to be genuinely perfect, with this effect bleeding over into perception of Mother 3 as well. Nowadays, while reception of both games still remains skyscrapingly positive, they're no longer viewed as the absolute pinnacles of RPG design that they were once treated as; this was most heavily represented by The Angry Video Game Nerd's highly praised review of EarthBound, which took an overall positive view of the game, but spent a good amount of time pointing out faults that even old fans came to agree were legitimate.
• No Export for You: The GBA compilation containing this game and its predecessor was only released in Japan, despite the fact that the original version of one game previously had a North American release while the other had a complete English translation that was only scrapped due to the age of the system it was on. There was a brief consideration of releasing it in America, which didn't pan out, partly due to the stateside failure of the original SNES version of EarthBound, partly because the complexity of the EarthBound half's coding (a trait carried over from the SNES release) would've made another localization prohibitively difficult.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Because Nintendo of America were suspiciously silent on EarthBound's lack of a Virtual Console release despite the ESRB issuing a rating for one (later discovered to be erroneous), fans started to speculate that the game was being blocked by legal quandaries surrounding its interpolation of American and British rock songs and the presence of an enemy based on Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory. Ultimately however, this turned out not to be the case: the real issue was the Epileptic Flashing Lights for PSI effects, which was remedied in the eventual Wii U Virtual Console release with a real-time blur filter.
• Referenced by...:
  • Gintama has an episode where the main characters eats some weird mushrooms in a forest, and another mushroom ends up growing out of their heads making them get lost. This is referencing the mushroom status effect which messes up the controls for a while the character has a mushroom on his or her head.
  • The Let's Player group The Runaway Guys is named after The Runaway Five as the three main players are all fans of the game.
  • Undertale and Deltarune do this quite a lot, on account of Toby Fox being a huge fan of the trilogy. It even takes up a dedicated folder on the former game's Shout-Out page.
  • In making Turning Red, director Domee Shi has stated that the look of her film was inspired by this game and others like it.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) has MatPat play a waiter named "Ness" as a nod to his infamous theory that Ness is Sans.
• Screwed by the Network: One of the most egregious cases in gaming. Only two thirds of the entire series ever made it to American shores, and the infamous marketing campaign ("this game stinks" was the marketing slogan) for Earthbound likely put a dent on sales. Even in Japan this appeared to be the case, although it was finally released for the Wii U's Virtual Console in March 2013. However, it was also confirmed that EarthBound would finally be getting a Western re-release on the Wii U Virtual Console — in Europe too, no less! — with Nintendo of America engaging in a hearty dose of Lampshade Hanging. Not only that, but two years later, Mother 1 was released as well.
• Similarly Named Works: The game shares its name with a 1983 PC adventure game, though that one formats it as the more conventional Earthbound.
• Tuckerization: Due to the long nights he worked to get the game localized, Nintendo of America allowed Marcus Lindblom, the game's localizer, to rename one of the minor NPCs to "Nico" after his daughter, who had just been born.
• Vaporware: The Mother 1 + 2 GBA compilation was advertised to have a Western release, but remained in Japan.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As there's a Dummied Out sprite in the game's code of Everdred's Ghost, it's possible that Everdred really was supposed to die in the game.
  • Ness's dog King has unused sprites for climbing up and down both ladders and ropes. Whether this means that King was planned to spend more time with Ness or simply that the hill west of Ness's home was going to feature ropes and ladders is unknown, and the sprites aren't even properly tied to King's party member data, anyhow.
  • One quote by Itoi also indicates that he wanted it to be ambiguous as to whether Ness was really the protagonist of the original MOTHER — in the final game, this ambiguity largely doesn't exist and he's fairly clearly a different character.
  • Early English promotional materials referred to Giygas as "The Geek" (an attempt at Anglicizing his Japanese name, Gyiyg), which would have been a hell of a Nightmare Retardant had they went through with that name.
• Word of Gay: In a 2003 interview, Itoi stated that even though it isn't outright stated in-game, he wrote Tony as a gay character, simply because he himself had a few gay friends and wanted to reflect the fact that gay children like Tony existed in real life.
• Word of Saint Paul: Marcus Lindblom, head of the English translation and localization, finally set the record straight on how to pronounce Giygas' name. It's pronounced as "Geegus" (with hard G's), not "Guy-gus" as it was often assumed to be. (For the record, Gyiyg is pronounced "Geeg", hence the use of Giegue in the first game.)

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