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.