20 years later, Nintendo’s weird RPG Mother 3 remains the greatest game never sold – AV Club

So why didn’t Nintendo put it out everywhere? Admittedly, it made a bit of sense at the time,  from a blood-sucking business perspective, anyway. For starters, the game went through costly development hell. Even though it was produced by Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata and developed by many of the same people who worked on Earthbound, including Shigesato Itoi, it went through a tortured 12-year development cycle as the team struggled to create something for the N64 and the system’s doomed 64DD add-on. The project was eventually canceled. Years later, it was revitalized at the Nintendo subsidiary Brownie Brown, which released the game at the tail end of the GBA’s lifecycle (the Nintendo DS had been out for nearly two years by then). The fact that it came out at all was a small miracle.

In an interview with Bloomberg, former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé said that the game wasn’t localized at the time because the company had already focused all its resources toward the DS. It likely didn’t help the calculus that Earthbound had been a major flop when it was first released in America in the ’90s due to some combination of questionable marketing, its hefty price tag (it was sold in a mandatory bundle with the strategy guide), and turn-based RPGs being more niche in the U.S. at the time. While Earthbound slowly built up a reputation outside of Japan in the years afterward, this initial failure, combined with Mother 3’s troubled development, contributed to Nintendo’s decision.

It’s a valid business explanation for that era (even if it leaves the game’s artistic value out of the equation), but one that doesn’t answer why Nintendo still refuses to localize the game in 2026. There’s arguably a larger audience for Mother 3 today than there was 20 years ago. Games inspired by Mother, like Undertale and Omori, have become extremely popular, proving there’s interest in this specific style of quirky RPG while also cultivating an audience that may not have been interested in Mother 3 until they heard about it through these related fandoms. If the game finally got its global release, social media, YouTubers, and Toby Fox would positively lose it; as Silksong’s popularity can attest, being a meme helps.

A major factor in Nintendo’s reluctance could be that Mother 3 already has an unofficial fan translation, meaning those who wanted to play the game in English may have already done so. In reality, though, only a small percentage of people are willing to go through the steps to make this work (even if it’s pretty easy to do). Regardless of those barriers, apparently over 100,000 people downloaded the fan translation in the first week alone. While there are definitely elements of the game that have aged a bit poorly, like its stereotypical portrayal of gender-nonconforming characters, the core thematic arguments in Itoi’s story have only grown more relevant with time: Climate change, right-wing strongmen, and wealth inequality are familiar headlines.

Sure, there are notable barriers from Nintendo’s side. According to a Reddit user who claims to be Doctor Fedora, a member of Mother 3’s unofficial translation team, it would take significant effort to make the game display English-language text because of how it was coded. But the Reddit post also mentions how the fan translation team had offered to legally hand over their localization of the game to Nintendo, something that Itoi acknowledged in the documentary Earthbound, USA. Itoi said that while he personally wanted Nintendo to finally localize the game, the company declined the fan translation offer because “it wasn’t quite as simple as that.” Even if it’s true that putting out the existing translation would be dubious for one reason or another, the fact that the company is sitting on a game that’s been hyped for 20 years, one that speaks to the moment in all its pixel art-infused, fascist-punching glory, justifies the endless calls for its re-release. Two decades and counting, complaining about Mother 3’s non-existent localization unfortunately remains timeless.