Reggie has spoken candidly in his new book titled Disrupting the Game about why the long-awaited Mother 3 never came to the west and he conceded that there were a number of important factors at play. Nintendo had considered adding it as a Virtual Console game on the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U on their respective digital storefronts, but it simply never happened. They did however release EarthBound Beginnings, which is the first Mother game, on the Wii U eShop. Reggie had previously spoken to Mr. Iwata about adding Mother 3 to the digital storefronts, but as we know, the former Nintendo president sadly passed away in 2015 aged 55 due to bile duct cancer and the Wii U system was a colossal failure in the sales department and therefore the company simply moved on to their next system.
“The initial decision not to launch the game had happened before I joined the company, but certainly afterwards I had many conversations with Mr. Iwata about this game, about the fan passion, and certainly the perspective was the first game on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System had not sold all that well. Certainly as I’ve gone back to look at it, the marketing wasn’t great. I think it was marketed some bizarre way like ‘this game stinks’ or something like that. It really was not the best marketing activity behind the launch of a new game. Because it hadn’t sold well, because yes there’s a lot of time and financial investment in localizing this type of content, it just really wasn’t a priority. And then when it’s at the point where we’re putting all of our effort on Nintendo DS and games like Metroid Prime Hunters and Mario Kart for DS and Pokemon for DS, it really just was not a strong business priority. But boy, the game journalists had to ask me every single time.”
“There was a serious conversation during the Nintendo 3DS days, and as we launched the Wii U, that we should look at making the game available digitally through our digital storefront, because at that point the production and distribution costs are the minimus. We had already had conversations about having a group of games that were not localized, that it was the pure Japanese game made available. And we did that for a number of titles. They did okay. Mr. Iwata and I had that conversation about Mother 3.
What ended up happening is that we launched the first Mother game called EarthBound Beginnings on the Wii U eShop. That’s a sense of the conversations that were happening and the thought process. And who knows? If Mr. Iwata had not passed away, if maybe the Wii U had done better in the marketplace, maybe the Mother 3 game would have made it at that point. So there were certainly conversations, but it would have needed to have been done the right way.”
Reggie says “Know your role”
America couldn’t handle Mother 3. Bunch of primitive screwheads
I’ll tell you what I want. I want to see a physical Earthbound trilogy released on the Switch. Not digital. I think the fans have waited long enough to have this reward.
certainly this should have happened on the 3DS.
I think Mother 3/a Mother Trilogy COULD have happened on 3DS or heck maybe even Switch, and Nintendo wouldnt have needed to foot as much of the bill. While its a rare occurrence, some Nintendo IPs have been published overseas by 3rd party companies. Ones that come to mind are Atlus publishing the US release of Cubivore and GBA version of Polarium, as well as Xseed publishing The Last Story. Perhaps Mother was too big of an IP that Nintendo figured even if they were having trouble localizing it, they still didnt want to see a big chunk of the profits missing if they had allowed another company to release it in this case, but its always a possibility. Nintendo didnt publish Cadence of Hyrule or the Mario & Sonic Olympic series, despite having their big names attached, so maybe if the right company really proved their quality to Nintendo, there would be a chance to see them localize and publish the games if NoA really doesnt want to.
reggie just like “your fault”
America couldn’t handle Mother 3. Bunch of primitive screwheads
un simple émulateur de GBA et écrit mother 3 roms ….c pas vraiment plus dur que ca ….et pour les coeur sensible ..mother 3 n est pas un happy game comme le 2
Haven’t the guys behind the fan translation offered to let Nintendo have their work, let them tweak it a bit and give it an official release? I believe Nintendo would actually do well to pull a Sega here and give this over to those folks who know/knew what they’re doing.
The support for Mother 3 is there- it’s there for the series as a whole. I’ve played the fan translation from start to finish at least 4 times but I would still buy an official release.
America couldn’t handle Mother 3. Bunch of primitive screwheads