The long awaited EarthBound Beginnings Remake romhack is now available after almost 2 decades in development
What once seemed like a far off dream, and after many, many community restarts throughout the years, the elusive Mother 1 / EarthBound Beginnings Remake is now a reality, as it just released today!
The original project began around 2007, almost 2 decades ago, with professional Japanese translator Clyde Mandelin, also known as "Tomato" (who is also known for his Mother 3 English fan translation), starting a proof of concept on what would be an initial showcase of a potential Mother 1 Remake within the very engine of the original EarthBound videogame, using romhacking tools at the time like JHack.
Eventually, the project shifted development towards 2010, this time with developer Hacking Star (H.S.) taking over Tomato as the lead developer, since other projects like the Mother 3 translation were taking focus from the Remake project. And so, H.S. continued work over the remake throughout the following years, starting from 2010, with many fans of the EarthBound/Mother community sharing assets, like sprites, in-engine music, maps, ideas, and much, much more, over at the Starmen.net forums, more specifically, over the PK Hack subforum, where people interested in modifying anything related to the Mother series gathered around.
Development continued slowly from 2010 all the way up to 2020. A group of community members from the PK Hack days remained in contact throughout a Slack server, one of which was HS as a regular, with others like Gabbi, Olivia, and yours truly, being a part of it as well.
However, by 2020, the pandemic began, and by April of that same year, all contact with HS was lost. Both through the PK hack forum and the Slack server, HS was nowhere to be seen afterwards.
2020 went by, turning over to 2021, and by then, some close members within the PK Hacking community, both from the forums and from the Slack server, wanted to keep all of the assets scattered throughout the years from the project, both from its original inception forum thread, as well as the newly made one by HS after the project changed developers.
Within that very group of EB enthusiast were Gabbi, Olivia, and yours truly, to mention a few, that started gathering assets, like sprites, maps and EBME files (EarthBound Music Editor files), in hopes that someday the project's history could live on, and in case the project would once again be revived, that it wouldn't have to start from scratch, like many previous attempts tried to.
From that resource gathering group, the inception of the current hacking group saw its beginnings, with Gabbi as lead director, and Olivia (Livvy) close by with music expertise from years and years within the hacking community. With that, the idea of restarting the Mother Remake was revitalized, but this time with a focus on a more "professional" kind of attempt, with the idea of "what if the original EarthBound developers remade the first game in the SNES engine".
And from there, the EarthBound Beginnings Remake development began in 2021.
Several veterans from the PK Hack Discord community joined the team, like PhoenixBound, Catador, SupremeKirb, cooprocks, Vittorio, to mention a few, as well as spriters and mappers that were present during the original Remake era, like Tricimir, Shadow, dart_nova, Akogiri, and many others.
Since 2021, the EarthBound Beginnings Remake development team has been working consistenly and with focus on remaking the original Mother title from the NES, into proper 16-bit glory, with all its quirks and lovely turns, threating it with care and passion, and adding tons and tons of assembly code, movement scripts and action scripts, to bring even the tiniest of details from the original into this newly created remake.
The EarthBound Beginnings development team shares this love letter with the EarthBound and Mother fanbase, and to the world, a labour that was born almost 2 decades ago, and that now in 2026 is finally a reality, brought over with love and passion for everyone to enjoy.
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