30 years ago today, EarthBound---the little RPG that, as it turns out,
could---was released in North America, to no great fanfare. The reasons
for its commercial failure are well trodden: its graphics looked
unsophisticated compared to its peers, the strange marketing campaign,
and a price tag that still makes the eyes water in 2025, let alone 1995.
But I rented it, and I fell in love. In July of 1996, I got a copy of my
own. Serendipitously, just two days ago, my grandmother unearthed a photo of
me clutching the oversized game box right after I bought it. I still have
the box, and I recreated it today, 29 years later.
The EarthBound online fandom was the first real fan community I became a part
of, and both the game and its community definitely shaped me as a person. In
fact, the only bit of media that comes close to Shigesato Itoi's EarthBound
on me is Terry Pratchett's Discworld.
What is EarthBound? It's a video game version of a children's playground
make-believe game where four kids become fast friends to save the world by
traveling through a series of increasingly strange and fanciful settings,
where even the weirdest, scariest, and most surreal of predicaments still have
the charm of childlike pretend stories. It's a sequence of stories about
helping people through fanciful adventures.
It's about great pizza, new friends, world travel, free daily newspapers,
and an alien megalomaniac. It's about winsom, courage, and friendship.
It's about the childhood experience of going out to play in a world that's
full of infinite wonder and possibilities, where you can be anyone, go
anywhere, and do anything; but where at the end of the day, you can always
come home, and your mom is waiting there with a home cooked meal of your
favorite food, ready to tuck you into bed and tell you how much she loves you,
and your dad is always just a phone call away to tell you how proud he is of
you (and send you money for the new baseball bat you want).
EarthBound is an adventure story that's ultimately a celebration of childhood
innocence.
I'm going to spend the rest of the day playing it.