Narin said:
Hadrian said:
Mother (NES) was planned for release in US/Europe but never came out. There are 100% translations and is known as Earthbound Zero.
Wrong, it did come out, theres an official english release of Earthbound for the NES but so very few numbers we're released that it never really made a big impact on the market. You can actually find the official, english (Non patched) versions of this game over the internet. I even have a copy of it on my Nintendo DS. At any rate, due to the short number of games that actually came out, it is one of the more rarer Nintendo games out there.
Wrong Double phale.
Earthbound Zero is not a translation of Mother (The Japanese title), but an unreleased official Nintendo prototype.
Nintendo came very close to releasing it in the US, so close that they had completed the translation and done some other things and even burned the EPROM to an NES cartridge. For whatever reason, they decided not to publish it stateside, and the prototype card ended up being forgotten about...
Fast forward to about 1998 or so, and somebody had gotten their hands on the prototype and were auctioning it on eBay. The winner of the auction refused to allow the NES emulation community to dump it unless he was paid for it, stating the value of such a rarity would decrease if dumped to a ROM file.
A fund raiser was held by two guys named Demi and Wildbill, who paid the buyer and got it dumped. However, the dominant NES emulator of the time was NESticle, and due to its inaccurate emulation couldn't run the game. So the game was hacked to allow it, but Nintendo had put in a checksum that would crash the game in two places (Complete with a "This is an illegal copy of blah blah blah).
So another hacker named TrelaneQ disabled the checksum routine, and all was well. To avoid confusion with the SNES Earthbound, Demi put "Zero" at the end of the title.
There's actually several changes from the japanese version, such as the ability to dash when moving around. And despite being a prototype, it is a fully complete game (A Holy Grail so far as game prototypes go). I actually went through it myself when the ROM was first distributed after it was dumped.
Sorry for the long winded reply, but I was around when all this happened, so yeah.
Wait no I wasn't.