Fans have been working on an unofficial remake of JRPG classic Mother for over 18 years now, and a number of iterations later, the latest version is finally eyeing up a release next year, and it already looks way better than the Wii U port Nintendo gave us a decade ago.
Although it was first released in Japan in 1989, fans overseas didn't get an English translation of Mother 1 until 2015, when a localized version was released on the Wii U Virtual Console as EarthBound Beginnings. However, many years before this – in January 2007, to be exact – one fan who went by Tomato began working on an unofficial version.
As documented on the upcoming remake's FAQ page, Tomato's development only lasted for a few months, but in 2010 a different fan, H.S, began working on his own version. Unfortunately, after almost 10 years, he "vanished from the community with no trace," leaving no files behind.
It was only in late 2021 that in an effort from the PK Hack community to "gather and archive all maps, sprites, music, and other assets created over the past decade for the project" spurred on a new developer, Gabbi, to pretty much start the whole thing "from scratch."
Highlighted by GoNintendo, the latest fan-made EarthBound Beginnings Remake project got a new trailer a few days ago, showing off the delightful 16-bit take on the NES classic, and as a ROM hack of EarthBound, this obviously looks very much like 1994 SNES game.
That's the whole idea, as the devs are "trying to imitate the original Mother 2 developers, in sprite style, tileset/map style, music, and programming" to imagine a scenario in which "EarthBound had been a massive hit and had seen an official re-release with both games in one box" – not counting the actual Mother 1 + 2 on the GBA, of course.
As well as the prettier visuals, perhaps the best bit about the remake is its updated gameplay. Answering the question of "will random encounters be reduced," the devs say that "since this game is a ROM hack of EarthBound, it won't have the same gameplay as the original."
We can see a glimpse of an enemy in the overworld in the trailer (around 37 seconds in), so it doesn't sound like our adventure will be halted by random encounters seemingly every five seconds this time. The encounter rate was so high before that it almost stopped me from playing the 2015 EarthBound Beginnings port, so this is a massive relief.
Notably, this isn't the only fan-made Mother project in the works. There's also Mother: Encore – a "re-imagining" that's in development from a different team. It's not 100% complete yet, but back in 2023, it got a demo that's still being updated (seriously, the most recent update was two days ago).
Meanwhile, the Earthbound Beginnings Remake won't be getting a demo, but it's currently set to launch on June 14, 2026. So, there's still quite a wait, but at this point, what's another 11 months?
In the meantime, be sure to check out our roundup of the best JRPGs you can play today.
