EarthBound: The Scratch-and-Sniff Flop That Became a Cult Masterpiece

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

I want you to picture a scenario that honestly it sounds completely made up, but I promise you is entirely a matter of historical record.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

Oh, it's, yeah, it's completely wild.

SPEAKER_1 (0:09)

Right. So imagine you're an executive at Nintendo, and it's the mid-90s. You've just spent roughly two million dollars to market this highly anticipated new video game.

SPEAKER_2 (0:19)

Which was a massive marketing budget back then.

SPEAKER_1 (0:22)

Huge. But instead of, you know, highlighting the massive world or the cool graphics or the story, your advertising team pitches a campaign built entirely around telling the American public that your product is terrible.

SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

Literally telling them it's bad.

SPEAKER_1 (0:36)

Yes. They print these huge magazine advertisements with massive bold letters declaring, this game stinks, and they don't even stop there. Those magazines actually include scratch and sniff cards that literally smell foul.

SPEAKER_2 (0:48)

Like genuinely disgusting.

SPEAKER_1 (0:50)

We're talking about the distinct chemical odor of flashilence and hot garbage.

SPEAKER_2 (0:55)

It is just a phenomenal example of corporate self-sabotage. You were spending a premium to actively repel the exact demographic you need to buy the product.

SPEAKER_1 (1:06)

Exactly. And it wasn't some avant-garde, self-aware art project. This actually happened in 1995 with the North American launch of a game called EarthBound. It was known in Japan as Mother 2 Yeah.

So today's deep dive is all about the incredibly strange life story of EarthBound. We're digging into a big stack of developer interviews, retrospective analyses and historical records just to understand how this happened.

SPEAKER_2 (1:31)

Because the trajectory of this game is really unlike anything else in the entire industry.

SPEAKER_1 (1:35)

It really is. We are going to trace its chaotic birth, its spectacular commercial death here in the United States, and then its frankly miraculous resurrection into one of the most influential cultural touchstones in modern gaming.

SPEAKER_2 (1:50)

Right. Our goal for you today is to explore that intersection of offbeat game design, the massive technical hurdles of cross-cultural localization, and really the undeniable world-changing power of grassroots Internet fandom.

SPEAKER_1 (2:04)

So let's start with the creation. Because from what I'm reading in these sources, just getting EarthBound onto a physical cartridge was basically a miracle.

The development took five years, which in the early 90s, five years is an absolute eternity for a video game. Why was it so chaotic?

SPEAKER_2 (2:21)

Well, the primary reason was the man leading the project, Shigesato Itoi. He wasn't a traditional game designer at all.

SPEAKER_1 (2:28)

Right. He was an outsider.

SPEAKER_2 (2:29)

Exactly. In Japan, Itoi was already famous, but as a copywriter, an essayist, and even a voice actor. I mean, he actually voiced the father in the studio Ghibli film, My Neighbor Totoro.

SPEAKER_1 (2:40)

Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_2 (2:42)

Yeah. So when he approached Nintendo to make a role playing game, he was completely exhausted by the standard tropes of the genre.

He looked at all these games filled with swords and sorcery, knights, dragons, and he just, he felt nothing.

SPEAKER_1 (2:54)

It was all played out.

SPEAKER_2 (2:55)

Right. Instead, he wanted to set his game in this satirical, sort of idealized version of 1990s Americana.

SPEAKER_1 (3:02)

Which completely flips the script for the player, because instead of playing as a knight in shining armor, you were playing as Ness, right? Just a kid in a baseball cap.

SPEAKER_2 (3:11)

Just a normal kid.

SPEAKER_1 (3:12)

And you're wandering around suburbs and cities with your friends. You're wielding yo-yos and baseball bats instead of broadswords.

SPEAKER_2 (3:18)

And your enemies aren't goblins or orcs.

SPEAKER_1 (3:21)

No. You were fighting aggressive taxi cabs, literal piles of vomit and walking nooses.

I honestly found the everyday mechanics to be the funniest part. Like, you don't stay at an inn to heal.

SPEAKER_2 (3:34)

You go to a hospital.

SPEAKER_1 (3:35)

You go to a hospital.

And you don't find gold in treasure chests. Your dad deposits your allowance into an ATM. And you literally have to find a cash machine to withdraw your adventuring funds.

SPEAKER_2 (3:46)

It's so clever. But underneath that quirky humor, Itoi was actually treating this as a serious emotional exercise. Cutting mean. Well, he specifically stated he wanted players to feel complex emotions.

Things video games rarely touched on back then, like distress, homesickness or deep loneliness.

SPEAKER_1 (4:04)

So the contrast between the bright cartoonish graphics and those heavy themes was entirely intentional.

SPEAKER_2 (4:09)

Completely intentional. And that contrast really peaks at the end of the game. The final boss battle against the alien Giygas is just infamous.

SPEAKER_1 (4:17)

I've seen images of that. It's a swirl of distorted faces and this bizarre, genuinely unsettling dialogue. The sources mentioned this was inspired by a movie Itoi saw.