History of EarthBound Rumors

if there's one thing we can collectively agree on when it comes to the Mother series it's that we never have any idea what the hell is going on with it erratic development's unclear if we'll ever even see the games again if you want something to mess with your attachment issues just become a fan of the Mother series but the hectic fist doesn't even come close to stopping at either of those markers the series has been littered with rumors for its entire existence So today we're going to look at some of the most interesting ones I could find for a long time atoy has had a fish camp in his office that's live on his website and since around the time a mother OnePlus 2's release a Mr Saturn plush was placed behind the tank now any normal person would go hey it's Mr Saturn they probably have a bunch of those at their office since you know it's the Creator the Mother series office cute they put one by the fish tank but mother fans are not normal so this started making its way across a bunch of forums online and it was noted how Mr Saturn's position would occasionally change then one day he was replaced by a bouquet of flowers and some jack-o-lanterns around Halloween as you can imagine was this the end of Mr Saturn sleeping with the fishes shortly after October Mr Saturn returned now sporting some warmers draped over his head pretty benign for sure but what do you think mother fans took away from this yo guys is Mother 3 coming out in December the likely reason he was placed here was probably to somewhat stimulate people and remind them the Mother series existed as Mother 3 was in development and released a few months later the webcam site is actually still up though very little happens at the time of writing this it actually has a Mr Saturn in frame but obviously this doesn't mean mother four is in development unless in September 2005 dsx2 reported that marvelous interactive posted a Flash animation that included a mysterious character who resembled Dr andanuts along with a countdown of approximately one week the report shortly reached starman.net and speculation around mother 3's development started once again at first many concluded that this was indicative that marvelous interactive was developing Mother 3 for the DS but others decided to dig deeper users decoded the flash file to see if they could extrapolate any other possible information some tried to force the timer down to zero but were just met with error messages and all that was really found was that the character in question was named doctor which believe it or not actually led to more speculation people started going well if it isn't doctor and a nuts why is he called doctor and not something like Professor I am a well-adjusted human being the character himself had a couple of animations one where he'd tap pattern onto a chalkboard and another one that only occasionally appear where he'd tap on the board in a slight different pattern and this and I cannot believe I'm already saying this again led to even more speculation so mother fans saw this right got it Morse code this started a wild goose chase of people attempting to decode this Secret Message of course nothing was found and another faction of theorist emerged that believed the tapping wasn't evidence for morse code but insinuating that tapping would be an integral mechanic to the final game which actually to some extent was true so fans waited for about a week and the day before the countdown was to finish user polk007 uploaded a magazine scan onto thestarmin.net forums that unveiled who the character really is and the game it was advertising the game in question turned out to be one called Contact a dsrpg and sadly for it actually ended up largely failing commercially and many reported that its failure was due to its unfortunate release date coinciding with another RPG mother three around November 2004 a screenshot of a game was posted onto a Japanese website and was noted for its style similarities to the Mother series its menu is basically a recreation of mothers and the house also resembles mother one style and the three characters featured in it also look much like ninten and these two NPCs from Earthbound this screenshot actually has remained a mystery to this day as its Origins have actually never been definitively found it's been pretty conclusively said to have been a hoax though and is most likely fan made funnily enough however the images style actually somewhat resembles the style seen in the 2002 development screenshots found in 2022 18 years later here's a small one also around 2004 a small Flash animation was featured on brownie Brown's website just after a toy had written a blog post about his visit to kichi joji where its headquarters were located around this time a toy had alluded several times to making trips and staying up late on a project he'd only referred to as it now it doesn't take a genius to understand why these images would make the mother Community go Haywire this was a few years after Mother 3's cancellation so suddenly seen a revamped rendition of mother 2's battle system from the company that a toy was just in the same area of was pretty alarming the page these were featured on doesn't really exist anymore but some older ones show that this Darth Vader guy referred to Simply as endude which I don't even feel comfortable saying seems to have been some sort of character featured in their blog posts or at least that's what I can gather these blog posts are absolutely insane and if you know Japanese I'd recommend checking them out for yourself but that might even demand its own entire separate video in the future the short flash animation was also featured in a section of Brandy Brown's website referred to as Project B a section which also featured information on the Nintendo Diaz generally and the RPG magical vacation the great hypnotist this animation caught the attention of edge magazine and was featured in an article and even mentioned starman.net obviously this sparked many rumors that brownie Brown was in fact the developer developing the new version of Mother 3 which of course turned out to be correct and now here are a couple of other quick ones about the GBA version of mother 3. in January 2006 it was erroneously reported by games or fun that the game subtitle would be death of the pig King this was due to the publisher using the old N64 logo and subtitle and it goes without saying but the final version didn't end up having a subtitle at all in December 2004 there was speculation that the N64 version was being ported to the DS though no origin of this rumor seems to have been found it was also rumored that the GBA version of Mother 3 wasn't intended to have the same or even a similar story to the N64 version many quoting a toy had even said several times that the game would have a completely different one from the original the facts however are that itoi never said anything like this and always danced around specifics and comparisons of the two stories Italy did do some rewriting for the script but overall the story is not drastically different even though it's undeniable elements of it were reworked in development by searching mother3.com for a long time you'd be redirected to Nintendo of America's website leading many delusional fans to believe well this must mean the game's being translated into English in reality the domain was actually registered by Nintendo of America all the way back in 1999 while I was still in development for the N64 and was still intended to at least have a North American release as well and was most likely to prevent some Shmo from buying it and neither spreading misinformation or starting a bidding war for it as of now the domain is actually available meaning Nintendo no longer cares if you do that go wild now ready for the stupidest one yet and and this was an actual rumor Mother 3 is being released on 420 either because a a toy likes drugs or B because it's Hitler's birthday because many have appropriately memeed on this fact but the truth is that April 20th takes place during one of the busiest shopping weeks in Japan and is known as golden week where basically everyone in the country has the week off plenty of other games have the same release as well some speculated a toy had no intentions of releasing any screenshots of the game prior to its release or on the game's packaging and originates from an author from insert credit who's known for starting hoaxes and even admitted it later that it was false on starman.net and hilariously enough itoi actually posted screenshots mere days later additionally rumors spun that these screenshots were from an early test build and this one I can at least give some credit they're clearly from a very late version possibly even the final one but are evidently taken with debug mode as select moments from them aren't possible to access in the way shown but those ones didn't even come until later posts and were likely due to just wanting to avoid spoiling certain story Beats one last one about the GBA version's development was that Flint actually was a grown-up version of Lucas he is not moving back to the Nintendo 64 version of the game a popular one was that Ness was intended to appear in the game and he's seen in this screenshot of the game and it's 100 real so what's the rumor then this one actually has a long history to it and was only concluded relatively recently some speculated Ness would return in a flashback or as an additional party member but was later said to be an earlier design for Klaus this last theory was one that the community ran with for a long time and I even echoed this in my mother three unused content video but since then an interview with a toy about Earthbound 64 was discovered where he revealed this mystery character wasn't even intended to appear in the final game at all yeah he was put there as sort of a way to lead anticipated players into the 3D version of the world of mother makes sense as the art direction from mother 2 to 3 are pretty different so having a familiar face in the vein of Ness and Nintendo make it feel a little less awkward isn't the strangest choice and it further makes sense as Nessa ninten were already sort of 3D with their clay models used in a ton of the other games marketing one of the craziest rumors I found which I'm surprised isn't more well known is that there was actually a rumor that Earthbound 64 never existed at all that it was nothing more than a tech demo created to advertise the n64dd a disk drive add-on Nintendo attempted to release for the N64 but didn't go far due to a failing commercially in Japan this one is sort of due to other Nintendo IPS having demos like this to show the n64's capabilities and saw a little pickup due to it you know being a game and seeing as its development was moved to the regular Nintendo 64 cartridge based console pretty publicly this rumor should have completely died out but apparently it lingered for quite a while some also thought the 64 version would have a scene in which Porky actually killed the chosen four from Earthbound a Reddit user claimed to own an Earthbound 64 prototype and it featured said scene there's likewise very little to substantiate this claim with no evidence at all but it was probably believed due to the presence of the nest stand-in and the footage in the trailer of seemingly ownette being destroyed another story-based rumor about it was that gigas was intended to be a part of the story this one spans all the way to the GBA version but the fact is that gigas was never planned to be in mother 3. this rumor picked up some steam since mother 1 and 2 both had him as the antagonist and articles about the game reported that UFOs were seen which later turned out to be the pig mask armies this is one that actually continues being said to this day but I assure you gigas was not at any point that we know of intended to be included in the game when the game was still being developed for the disk drive it was said that the game would have had an expansion called mother 3.5 and was reported by IGN that it was being developed despite the DD's failure this is a classic case of a rumor being believed simply because it was echoed by a popular publication a Twitter user even asked mother 64's game designer akihiko Mira about it to which he debunked the claims stating that no specific action was done in regards to an expansion for the game around 2002 the first rumors and leaks about mother OnePlus 2 and Mother 3 on the GBA started surfacing on July 3rd 2002 this scan of an article from femitsu Club Magazine appeared on starman.net the article seems to be a section discussing Rumors in the gaming industry with characters playing the roles of the rumor mill and the truth named Miss rumor and Mr truth mistruth says I've heard that one game company is going to revive a masterpiece RPG of the past for the advance and it's not your usual ordinary game this one and only Masterpiece that everyone has long waited for and this is the part where it gets interesting they're first gonna release the revived games but after that they're gonna release a completely new sequel for advance Mr truth responds hmm a masterpiece of Masterpiece RPGs you mean no kidding I can still believe the part about Reviving for advance but it's hard to believe the part about a new sequel for Advance well but if it's true I'd like to believe the happy news this one as we all know actually turned out to be true and the rest is history though it seems to be unknown as of now where these rumors originated from possibly just an Insider Source a rumor of a remake of Earthbound that was to coincide with the hobonichi mother project announcement appeared on 4chan in 2020 with it supposedly being announced on June 11th and released on September 18th and that its trailer was meant to be revealed in a similar way to Paper Mario the origami King it was also said its visual style would be similar to the Link's Awakening remake but with a more clay feel to resembled the models though this one of course turned out to be fake funny enough the most believable aspect to it was that the post said there was no word on remakes for Earthbound Beginnings or Mother 3 and that they were unsure if the Remake would even see a western release in May 2020 a rumor emerged that an Earthbound character would be the next DLC fighter in Super Smash Brothers ultimate second fighter pass and is the origin of this fake image the leak suggests Porky would have been the next addition and would have fought in his spider Mech similar to the Koopa kids clown cars this leak also suggested this hypothetical reveal would coincide with an announcement of mother 3's worldwide release a common motif of these quote leaks in August 2020 three supposed screenshots of Earthbound 64 serviced featuring one of the pig mask Army one of Lucas kumatora and boney presumably on sonocat mountain and one of West duster and kumatora finding the Egg of light these appeared in the mother forever Discord server after being posted originally on 4chan not really much else to say about these other than they were fake though they're pretty cool mock-ups they're frankly just too high quality every piece of Earthbound 64 footage that wasn't taken on a camcorder that was publicly released has been seen so there's no possible place these could have come from a a prototype that was never mentioned and would have been the much bigger news or B someone made them up and even if these were from a copy of the game they wouldn't be this grainy red flags all over in early 2014 there were some rumors circulating about a surfaced Earthbound 64 prototype these originated from a YouTube comment red flag made by a user called skater 24481 where he commented on a remix video that he remembered playing The Game's demo saying it was great a month later he commented on another video claiming this time the music from the video wasn't in the version of the game he owned saying it only had hippie music obviously many were skeptical but after closer inspection of his YouTube channel it was found the guy is actually a hardcore video game and console collector with some pretty informative videos on different prototypes Vedas and other gaming Rarities in a Common Thread skater revealed the copy he had was an E3 demo most likely from 1998. he described the demos beginning with the demo movie from the spaceworld99 version letting you wander around attack likely tasmily Village then fight a few enemies and ending with the sub boss dubbing it boring he also said he couldn't make a video of it due to having sold it a few years before offline that's sadly where this rumor ends as nothing was ever followed up on this one I suppose is somewhat still up in the air but skater's switching attitudes about the demo within one month sways me in the direction that it was a hoax he thought he could spin due to his reputability back in 2016 another rumor of mother 3's localization spread on the internet supposedly to be released in honor of the game's 10th anniversary this one was perpetuated by Emily Rogers who frequently stirs nintendo-related rumors claiming to have an inside source this was then furthered by rumor spreader Liam Robertson of unseen 64. who said he'd also heard the same thing Roger's initial tweet contained a photo of nothing but Flint of mother 3's kumatori clay model with the caption smiley face 2016. now I know it seems like nothing but the usual someone says it's coming and it doesn't and neither of them had incredible track records but this one for some reason picked up unbelievable Steam and tons of gaming Outlets reported that Mother 3 would finally be localized for its 10th anniversary and announced via the then upcoming Nintendo Direct anxieties and pressures on Rogers were high as the mother Community had and still has come on Reggie give us mother three how about this instead some past hurt so all eyes were on these two you have to understand that even though there had been speculation about it happening in the past this was the highest hopes that ever for Ben and the Rumor was widespread across the internet and tons of people including me took it as basically confirmation and all the anticipation led to Mother 3 going trending on both Twitter and Facebook then the Nintendo Direct finally came then went with no mention of mother 3. then the denial set in fans started saying it's actually going to come next march on the 3rd it's 3-3 dude it has to be Emily Rogers responded to the collective disappointment by digging her feet into the the ground tweeting from a new account I was told today that Mother 3 is still coming this year also go Nintendo tweets t27 duck needs to stop acting like an unprofessional Punk March 3rd also came and went and fans quickly shifted to the translation being revealed on the game's actual anniversary April 20th and once again radio silence on the road to the new release date sometime during E3 conspiracies were spiraling all over the place as well as blatant misinformation hype was an all-time high and new rumors emerged as well some saying its release was being delayed for Nintendo's next console which would be later revealed in October to be the switch E3 finally arrived then it ended no announcement eight months after the initial rumor in November 2016 Rogers again tweeted about mother 3. though not as confidently as she did back in February in summer 2018 there was what's known as the gigas League this one's nothing more than this singular screenshot meant to suggest that this was a trailer for gigas's inclusion somehow someway in Smash ultimate though it's pretty obviously fake at the time though the game's character announcements had a villain Motif so I can see why some people thought this was somewhat intriguing but come on how a guy gets even work in Smash either as a playable character or a boss there was also a rumor that Lucas was intended to replace nessen brawl which as far as smash rumors go is actually pretty believable as it obviously originates from the fact Lucas was intended to replace Ness and melee though this never happened due to Mother 3's contemporary cancellation the Wabi game Festival occurred in Japan in 2007 and featured a demo of brawl this spurred rumors from people claiming to have played it that Rosalina from Super Mario Galaxy and duster for Mother 3 were assist trophies coincidentally Rosalina went on to become a full-fledged fighter in the next Smash Bros game and duster seems to be dead in 2014 there was also an April Fool's joke of a mother 4 announcement made by a Japanese fan also saying it had a January 2015 release date though he clarified its joke status at the bottom of the same post not a ton to this one but man is this crack in Sprite are cool as hell here's a weird one in 2009 Chad conselmo from Destructoid visited a psychic and was told that Mother 3 would be released for the Nintendo DS does this one even really count as a rumor probably not but where the hell else am I gonna include this about two weeks after Mother 3 was officially released official Nintendo magazine in Europe published an article about it that seemingly confirmed it would be released outside to Japan at the end of the year one of the only ones definitively officially from Nintendo this one is very interesting as not only does it say all this but it also lists it officially as Earthbound 2. this title was somewhat confirmed back in EarthBound at the famous four side building but this reiteration of it 12 years later was really awesome this however never came to be and although had some guessing should have been obvious as Nintendo never cared about European releases for this series anyway in November 2013 two supposed screenshots from the then upcoming Super Smash Brothers for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS spread online these images included Ness and Jigglypuff one of them on the battlefield stage and one of nessa's official render neither had been confirmed yet so many were actually pretty worried that Ness had been cut from the game the first was found to be fake by cross-checking it with a real screenshot of link and Toon Link and the second was found to be fake after Ness was unofficially confirmed when the game released in Japan the next year ness's render for ultimate however Bears a striking resemblance to the fake mock-up though in May of 2001 anticipation for Super Smash Brothers Melee was high and as with any game in the series all the talk was about who the new characters would be this one's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things but it's funny so I wanted to mention it as the opening cut scene was shown many tried to extrapolate who else might be in the game and Nintendo World Report set a possible candidate was Mr Saturn since he appears with ness in the movie this one didn't go very far but still funny and hey they released partially red [Music] there's too many to count but there have been numerous rumors of Earthbound collections over the last decade and a half one of the more notable ones of these rumors was one that spread around 2014 that set a collection called Earthbound forever was in development that was slated to be revealed in the February 2015 issue of Game Informer in an interview with a toy and would be released in 2016. the idea was that it would be the final penultimate video game project by a toy a remastering of the mother Trilogy it also stated Mother 3 would be localized under the title Earthbound 2 and would be more than a Fresh coat of paint though what was meant by that was never made clear a lot of faith was put into this rumor for some reason and oversaw the glaring hole in the penultimate project angle to all this and that was a toy already had done that the mother trilogy and also the fact that Nintendo would not announce this through Game Informer some were led to believe that this was hinted at in Porky's trophy description in Super Smash Brothers Brawl it's saying we might need another two games to explain his transformation people also thought this could be true due to the Robot Chicken sketch at E3 2014 many in disbelief Nintendo would do something like that then still not give us the game some also thought fan gamer was in on it thinking there was some connection between it and there you are now Earthbound box and Earthbound USA documentary which is its own whole can of worms as the documentary's previous slogan was coming 2016 unless Mother 3 is released some saw a toy's participation in the project as a good sign of this connection instead that year Lucas was cut from Smash one of the sadder rumors that turned out to be true was that Earthbound wouldn't ever come to the Wii's Virtual Console there was a lot of Buzz around if it would ever make it or not and in 2007 an unsolicited message to starman.net Simply reading Earthbound on VC in July stirred a lot of conversation though obviously nothing came of this it topped Nintendo's Most Wanted VC games list for several consecutive months and was routinely left with no response from Nintendo this was a common one around the internet in the late 2000s and started with posts on starman.net and Earthbound Central and even made its way to professional gaming Outlets we have it now on the Wii U 3DS SNES mini and switch online but at the time there was serious concerns the game would never be re-released and by this time the game was already nearing its 15th anniversary the reasoning for it was never made a hundred percent clear but most say it was due to concerns regarding the game's use of samples and pop culture references namely The Beatles and Chuck Berry some places also said that it had to do with the skyrunner's theme so an entirely new composition would have had to be created which understandably would have been a lot of work to invest into a virtual console game though not through official sources this one was supposedly confirmed by industry insiders I do like how this Nintendo life article refers to starman.net as just star men though just strikes me as funny as it sort of comes across like the writer didn't really do their Research into the community surrounding the games which this article is largely about despite this the possibility of a re-release never seemed impossible and did eventually come to fruition completely intact with nothing even having to be changed sort of sad to look back on but also heartwarming that everything did eventually work out after it was announced in 2013 that Earthbound was going to be re-released for the Wii U Virtual Console a mysterious listing for the game showed up on Amazon UK that may priced at 41.99 in English currency or 5137 in American this seemed way too high of a price point for a virtual console game and Nintendo life speculated that it could be a the item did not in fact exist at all B some sort of physical retail copy that was also in the works I would possibly have all three mother games or C and all new game slash reimagining slash reboot of Earthbound using the same title was going to be released hmm which do you think this turned out to be one that was perpetuated for a long time was that mother 3's lack of a localization was due to cultural concerns that the game was too controversial to release overseas due to its ever-present themes of bereavement suicide critiques of economic systems and many more and in February 2019 Nintendo everything published perhaps the most well-known article on the topic citing game and former senior editor Imran Khan is saying it was full steam ahead for a while but upon re-evaluation there were aspects of the game that weren't going to go without controversy he didn't Point any elements specifically but again it's not too hard to see which ones may have been seen as touchy this rumor has seemingly been disproven since then as in mid-2022 Reggie did an interview in which he clarified Mother 3 not being translated was not at all a matter of the game's content and to me this makes a lot of sense seen as Nintendo everything's singular source for their article was nothing but a forum post when Earthbound and Earthbound Beginnings were re-released on Nintendo online one of mother 3's producers said he'd love to see an international release this isn't a rumor at all but I want to draw attention to this article about it as the section annoys me so much it says mother didn't see a release outside of Japan until nearly 20 years after its Japanese release that's not true Earthbound Beginnings was released worldwide in 2015 and mother was released on the NES in 1989. that's 26 years later not nearly 20 unless you're rounding down for some reason but clearly they weren't doing that as their point is how long it took I know this doesn't sound connected to anything but it annoys the hell out of me fix this article one of the weirdest rumors came on February 18 2018 from a supposed League from Funko the company behind Funko pops and if you don't know what those are all you need to know is the Hulk Funko Pop is is bigger than the rest the leak showed a collection of ips Funko was at the time now in possession of to license merchandise this one spread throughout the day but was almost immediately shut down by Funko themselves the last one I'd like to talk about occurred at E3 2010 where infendo reported there was apparently a door near Nintendo's booth that just said Dr Ando nuts on it sort of similar to Nintendo's Earthbound conference room in their offices in the weeks leading up to this a supposed leak to line up for many game studios E3 press conferences had made the rounds on starman.net and Earthbound Central that included Nintendo announcing a game called Earthbound re-entry as well as Luigi's Pie Factory Destructoid ended up making a video on the Dr antonette's door confirming it was in fact real sadly though nothing ever came of it so its name was apparently arbitrary adore metaphorically leading to nothing sound familiar probably not comprehensive like any topic when you're approaching the Mother series but nonetheless interesting and sort of crazy what people are willing to believe on the internet funny how it seems that confusion hasn't even come close to becoming any clearer over more than 20 years of rumors lesson is trust nobody all right then see you soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: MonkeyNess

Views: 31,748

Keywords: mother 3, history, earthbound, mother 2, earthbound beginnings, switch, nintendo, e3, meme, did you know gaming, cybershell, ness, paula, jeff, duster, kumatora, lucas, boney, ninten, ana, teddy, lloyd, shigesato itoi, dr andonuts door, brownie brown, gba, snes, nintendo 64, mother 64, earthbound 64, beta, rumors, leak, super smash bros, ultimate, melee, brawl, wii, gamecube, sakurai, fan translation, Wii u, giygas, earthbound 2, mother 4, fake, explained, nintendo nx, reggie, prototype, dlc fighter, monkeyness

Id: dxEIk1fePtQ

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023