Mother: Saved by Emulation

By Leslie Paul

Digital piracy has many forms. Burning a copy of the DVD you rented and selling it to your friends is piracy. Downloading music for free is piracy. Hacking your Wii so you can play previously inaccessible titles is piracy.

Some people consider emulation piracy.

I disagree. Or, at the very least, I see no real harm in it. In fact, I don’t take much issue with any form of digital piracy unless it’s done for something other than strict personal use. But for emulation in particular, my convictions are especially strong.

//Gone and forgotten
Downloading games that are no longer in production is perfectly okay – because let’s face it: unless you’re a geezer, extremely loaded, or just very fortunate, it’s entirely likely that your childhood lacked much in retro gaming. Until now, my retro experience was limited to a handful of NES and Genesis games, the latter only played at friends’ and cousins’ houses. And I suspect, for many of us, our old-school experience may not have been as fulfilling as we would have liked. Perhaps we were too young to enjoy such classics such as Dragon Warrior and Gauntlet. Or perhaps we did have that fortune, but over the years had to give it up, and now no longer have access to those former treasures.

Thanks to emulation, this door has been reopened. For many gamers, young and old, emulation has created an opportunity to fill in the gaps and get caught up in fits of overwhelming nostalgia. But it’s done something else, too. Now, not only do gamers have access to virtually every Castlevania title on the NES, we now have access to the obscure, the untranslated, and the never ported.

The list of Japanese-only releases now available is tremendous. And, thanks to many devoted fans, several of these have translations. Fantastic titles like Just Breed and Ys, games that were only released in Japan, can now be played and enjoyed in full.

This is especially true for the rather unique case of the original Mother.

//Hacked to shreads
The commercial success of Mother in Japan during the late 80s initially convinced Nintendo to modify, translate and distribute the bizarre RPG for American audiences. However, due to delays, the release date eventually got pushed to sometime during 1991. Because of the proximity to the release of the SNES at that time, as well as Americans’ preoccupation with stomping on koopas and evading the wrath of angry monkeys, Nintendo of America, no doubt in its best interests, canceled the North American production of Mother before a single copy was ever made.

In fact, nowhere outside of Japan would see anything of the quirky series until Mother 2 (renamed Earthbound for Western audiences) some years later. While it didn’t do as well as Nintendo would have liked, it did create a loyal fan base of snerds and recluses who whittled their time away chatting on internet forums about peculiar but fascinating games scarcely anyone had ever heard of.

This devoted fan base took it upon themselves to bring the utter zaniness that is the Mother series to the masses in all its glory. Some time in the mid-late 90s, Demiforce, a community of ROM hackers made somewhat famous for their translations of Final Fantasy II and III for the NES, miraculously found and purchased a surviving flash cart of the original Mother, the very same that had been canceled all those years ago.

With beta in hand, they created a ROM and changed the title screen from “Mother” to “Earthbound Zero” so as to prevent confusion among Western fans. And that was all the tampering they had to do with it. Nintendo had already done the majority of the work. It was already translated for comprehensibility and edited to cut out any nastiness like blood, drugs and religion because, you know, the American public is sensitive.

//Frying pans and UFOs
God bless Demiforce. If it weren’t for them, RPG nerds would never have had the opportunity to save the world from an unnamed threat with nothing but such ordinary items as baseball bats, frying pans and bottle rockets. They would never cruise through the desert in a tank, much less fight a massive robot blocking your path with it. They would never get the chance to survive taunting from hippies or exhaust gases from possessed vehicles. The talking monkey in the ruins would never hit on their female lead. Their bank account would remain forever empty because they never called their father in order to transfer funds. Their psychic powers would go unused, missing the hilarity that ensues whenever a teleport spell fails…

The list goes on.

Rats would never curse at them. The first kid to join your party would never blow up the science lab. The strange realm of Magicant would never be explored, dividing the line between modern and traditional RPG settings. The cactus would never sing one of eight melodies needed to defeat the final boss. The bats would never ponder the circumstances; the skunks would never trip over themselves. The protagonist would never die of a common cold…

And on.

Crows would never laugh at them… Zombies would never overrun a town… Strange UFO frequencies would never drive the animals insane… There’s just so much!

But, well, in a way, I’d be wrong. All of these things would have happened. Just only in Japan. And in today’s world, without emulation, Mother would have only been a thing of the past, a memory of something truly great. Sure, it can be argued that emulation steals profits from Nintendo’s Virtual Console, but it can also be argued that emulation has introduced a new fan base to games that they otherwise never would have played. And besides, Nintendo has released Pinball over Earthbound on the VC. Why would they ever translate great titles like Just Breed and Mother, let alone release them?