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From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mother (マザー Mazā), called EarthBound Beginnings outside of Japan, is a 1989 video game for the Famicom. It was developed by Ape and published by Nintendo. It is the first game in the Mother series of video games. The game was created to be like the Dragon Quest games. Mother takes place in the late 20th-century United States and is about a young boy named Ninten, who is on a quest to defeat the alien called Giegue.

The game's development began when Shigesato Itoi gave the idea of Mother to Shigeru Miyamoto during a visit to Nintendo's headquarters. At first, the idea was declined by Miyamoto, but it continued when he gave Itoi a team to help make the game. The game was planned to be sold in the USA as Earth Bound, but Nintendo of America chose not to release it. This is because when they finished making it into English, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was about to be released. However, the game's English version was found and put on the internet, where it was called EarthBound Zero by fans. The game was officially released as EarthBound Beginnings on the Wii U Virtual Console in the US in 2015 and for Nintendo Switch Online in February 2022.

Mother was the sixth best-selling game of 1989 in Japan, where it sold about 400,000 copies and received a "Silver Hall of Fame" score from Famitsu magazine. Mother was praised for its similarities to the Dragon Quest series and its simultaneous parody of the genre's tropes; however, many considered its sequel EarthBound to be similar and a better overall implementation of Mother's gameplay ideas, with the game's high difficulty level polarizing critics, along with balance issues. Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com wrote that Mother importantly generated interest in video game emulation and the historical preservation of unreleased games. The game was re-released in Japan on the single-cartridge compilation Mother 1+2 for the Game Boy Advance in 2003.