Mother 3 Translation Project

The Mother 3 translation project is almost complete. Mother 3 is the third installment in the Mother game series (Earthbound in the US). Earthbound 0 was for the NES and a translated cartridge was made by Nintendo but never released in the US until a group of rom hackers copied the rom file from the Earthbound 0 cartridge that had been bought by a collector. Earthbound 1 was the only game in the series that saw a US release on the SNES system. Earthbound 1 was a huge loss for Nintendo as it only sold a few hundred thousand copies and Nintendo had poured a lot of money into the advertising. Because of this, it is probably why Nintendo refused to release Mother 3 into the US as Earthbound 2 in 2006.

Fortunately, there was a group of rom hackers on the Earthbound fan website http://www.starmen.net/ who decided to translate the game themselves. At first they were reluctant to do so, but this changed after seeing Nintendo practically abandon any attempt at releasing Mother 3 into the US. The hackers of the Mother 3 rom officially stated that they would abide with any wishes by Nintendo if their translation project was thought to be a violation of copyright law. However, Nintendo has yet to send a Cease and Desist order or threaten the translation team with any sort of legal action. Frankly, it almost seems as if Nintendo could really care less about the Mother 3 franchise at all.

The hacking part of the translation project is now complete today, and all that remains is the testing phase. This will probably take around a month as Mato checks the translation patch to see if there are any remaining issues. For all of you Earthbound/Mother fans, I would probably estimate a release sometime in October. Read the Mother 3 translation blog for further details.

http://mother3.fobby.net/2008/09/26/all-hacking-complete/#comment-21324