EarthBound, released in 1994 role-playing video game developed by Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as the second entry in the Mother series. The game focuses on Ness and his party of Paula, Jeff and Poo, as they travel the world to collect melodies from eight Sanctuaries in order to defeat the universal cosmic destroyer Giygas.

EarthBound had a lengthy development period that spanned five years. Its returning staff from Mother (1989) included writer/director Shigesato Itoi and lead programmer Satoru Iwata, as well as composers Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka, who incorporated a diverse range of styles into the soundtrack, including salsa, reggae, and dub. Most of the other staff members had not worked on the original Mother, and the game came under repeated threats of cancellation until Iwata joined the team. Originally scheduled for release in January 1993, the game was completed around May 1994 and first released in Japan in August 1994, and in North America in June 1995. A port for the Game Boy Advance developed by Pax Softnica, bundled with Mother, as Mother 1+2, was released only in Japan in 2003.

Like its predecessor, EarthBound is themed around an idiosyncratic portrayal of Americana and Western culture, subverting popular role-playing game traditions by featuring a modern setting while parodying numerous staples of the genre. Itoi wanted the game to reach non-gamers with its intentionally goofy tone; for example, the player uses items such as the Pencil Eraser to remove pencil statues, experiences in-game hallucinations, and battles piles of vomit, taxi cabs, and walking nooses. For its American release, the game was marketed with a $2 million promotional campaign that sardonically proclaimed “This game stinks”. The game’s puns and humor were reworked by localizer Marcus Lindblom. Since the original Mother had not yet been released outside Japan, Mother 2 was called EarthBound to avoid confusion about what it was a sequel to.

EarthBound features many traditional role-playing game elements: the player controls a party of characters who travel through the game’s two-dimensional world composed of villages, cities, caves, and dungeons. Along the way, the player fights battles against enemies and the party receives experience points for victories. If enough experience points are acquired, a character’s level will increase. This pseudo-randomly increases the character’s attributes, such as offense, defense, and the maximum hit points (HP) and psychic points (PP) of each character. Rather than using an overworld map screen like most console RPGs of its era, the world is entirely seamless, with no differentiation between towns and the outside world. Another non-traditional element is the perspective used for the world. The game uses oblique projection, while most 2D RPGs use a “top-down” view on a grid or an isometric perspective.

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