The third and final installment in the Earthbound series, Mother 3, is 20 years old today.
Launching on the Game Boy Advance on April 20th, 2006, the quirky RPG sequel still has not seen an official release outside of Japan, despite decades of Western fans begging Nintendo to localize it.
Lucas, Mother 3’s protagonist, has been a playable fighter in the wildly successful Super Smash Bros. series since his Brawl debut in 2008. The Wii title also introduced New Pork City as a stage, based on the Mother 3 location of the same name. The game’s presence in Smash still marks the series’ most prominent exposure outside of Japan.
Mother 3 began development as a SNES title, before being shifted to a launch title for Nintendo 64’s 64DD add-on (a Japan-exclusive floppy drive expansion that offered more storage than N64 cartridges could). The game was cancelled in 2000, as Nintendo was forced to focus its resources on its upcoming GameCube console.
It was announced in 2003 that the project had been restarted. Despite shifting from 3D back to another 2D title, the development team of the final version of Mother 3 still used the Nintendo 64 prototype for inspiration and kept the original story, according to a 2010 interview.
Super Smash Bros. Director Masahiro Sakurai has previously revealed that Lucas was originally supposed to appear in 2001’s Melee as a replacement for Ness, but the idea was scrapped when Mother 3’s Nintendo 64 version went into limbo.
A popular and widely acclaimed fan translation was released in 2008, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of English players to experience the game. The team invested thousands of hours translating massive amounts of dialogue, even creating their own tools to assist them. To this day, it is considered one of the greatest translation projects to come from a gaming community.
Mother 3 saw a Japan-only re-release on the Nintendo Switch Online service in 2024 and, unsurprisingly, international fans were rather upset at yet another missed opportunity for Nintendo to localize the game.
The game is commonly associated with former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé, who was frequently pestered by fans begging for an English version. He continues to toy and tease the fan base in response on his X account, and the meme was even joked about by Nintendo itself in its E3 2014 clay animation.
The Mother franchise still sees new merchandise releases, with official shirts based on Earthbound and Mother 3 announced earlier this month.
Two decades on, Mother 3 is a truly unique piece of Nintendo history: a beloved classic that never officially crossed borders, yet found a global audience regardless. On its 20th anniversary, fans are left celebrating its legacy the only way they know how: by continuing to wait.
Check out more EarthBound/Mother content
Official EarthBound and Mother 3 shirts based on Ness, Lucas, and Claus now available
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Written by Reece Heather
A veteran Zelda Universe editor and First-class journalism graduate, Reece emerged with a Nintendo 64 and a lifelong obsession after a narrow escape from Santa’s Naughty List in 1998. Outside of games, he’s reading Punisher comics, being bossed around by his cocker spaniel, and cornering innocent bystanders to rant about the importance of game preservation.
