When you look at what certain lists consider to be the best SNES games of all time the usual suspects are there like Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, various Mario games, and of course Zelda games. There is one mixed in there though that I am not alone is saying that I never played it and it wasn't even a big seller when it was released. In fact, despite being as avid a gamer as I have ever been in my life when the SNES was on the scene, I didn't even know anyone that had it.
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I think there are a number of reasons why this game failed to resonate with players (in the United States) back in 1995 but one of them was the graphics and how people were very unlikely to try a game that didn't look amazing back then. We need to keep in mind that console gaming in 1995 was still something we were wrapping our heads around and the technology was changing so fast that if a game had graphics that didn't look "cutting-edge" it was likely to be cast aside. This was a defining fault of Earthbound.
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By the graphical standards of the 16-bit era, this looked like it belonged on the last generation systems and since we didn't have the internet in a widespread manner at the time, most people would never even know how amazing and unique the story was in this game - not that this would have mattered to most people.
Hell, I was a massive fan of RPG's as the time and this game was totally overshadowed by the masses of other RPG's that we had available at the time. For me the ones that captured my attention the most was the Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star series and both of those had a, errr, fantasy feel to them.
So when we saw a game that showcased a bunch of bobble-head kids running around in the adverts in magazines (remember those?) it didn't do much to pique our interest.
Nintendo saw great success with this game in Japan as it was one of the best-selling games when it was released a year prior so they actually sunk quite a bit of money into an advertising campaign to promote it. This, combined with advanced copies sent to critics still wasn't enough to get people to give a crap and many of the critics that received advanced copies didn't even bother to review the game at all. This suggests that they didn't play it very much or maybe didn't even play it at all.
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I mean honestly, why would you play it? Look at those graphics! They look like trash compared to what we were slowly becoming accustomed to in the mid 90's and it is easy to understand that people would give this a miss simply by looking at the box itself, which is what a lot of us, including me, based our purchasing decisions on.
Before Nintendo finally threw in the towel and gave up on this game they had managed to sell just over 150,000 of them in North America. Consider these numbers on other SNES blockbuster games.
- Final Fantasy 6 - 3.2 million
- Super Mario Kart - 9 million
- Super Mario World - over 20 million
So yeah, you have to go really far down the list of sales figures to encounter Earthbound.
Like a lot of things, hindsight is 20/20 and years later people would realize that they seriously missed out on what has become known as a classic of sorts and unlike the others that are on most "best of" lists there are very few Earthbound copies that even exist. I don't know if the excess copies were destroyed but they were probably retrofitted with new guts to accommodate other games. A sealed copy of Earthbound will cost you more than $4000 and this figure is likely to grow because there weren't very many unopened copies of this game to begin with.
Just a functioning cartridge without the accompanying materials that came in the box will easily cost over $100 for collectors.
So what made this game that appeared to be garbage so great? Well, all the fans agree that it is one of the most inventive storylines that has ever been done in an RPG and if players simply gave the game a chance they would find themselves sucked into the enthralling story.
Shigeru Miyamoto, who has held various positions with Nintendo including Game Director, stated that this is the only RPG that he has ever played from start to finish. It was actually his own love for the game that resulted in this game appearing in the North American marketplace at all. Because of the immense amount of translation work that needs to be done on RPG's, many great titles never made it over the Pacific.
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The rather simplistic combat system didn't do much for potential purchasers either
It wouldn't be until around 1999 that North American gamers, driven by the now-everywhere internet, realized that they had made a terrible mistake by avoiding this game and people scrambled to try to find a copy somewhere only to realize that there weren't that many to be had. Of course, these days it is really easy to get a ROM of the game and unlike a lot of the other digital only RPG's that I have played in the past, this one is actually really worth it. The game is downright bizarre at point and even though the graphics are even worse now than they were back in the 90's given our current graphical prowess, I would be willing to bet that most RPG fans will still get sucked into this one .
You can get a ROM here but you will need to download the SNES emulator, which they offer on the site as well across a wide variety of platforms including mobile.
I missed this game and never played it until the mid 2000's. I regret nothing. The story is haunting and it is a truly unique title for the SNES. How did we ever let this slip by us back in the 90's?