Our decade long struggle for Earthbound re-release ends in V

[Julius Seeker]

I wish I could have fit Victory with a few exclamation marks at the end of that title.

VICTORY!!!!


Earthbound co-creator Satoru Iwata, currently CEO of Nintendo, announced the news personally yesterday morning on Nintendo Direct. Earthbound will be released this year on the Wii U Virtual Console in North America and Europe.

I'm probably going to be by far the most excited person here on this one! =D

This marks the end of a decade long struggle to get a re-release of Earthbound over to the west.

I love Earthbound, it is one of my favourite RPGs of all time, and I have played it through from start to finish way more times than I can accurately remember.

Now for those who have been following. Earthbound originally released in 1995 on SNES, I got the game that year for Christmas, and about a year and a half later I was on this board blabbing on and on about how much of a fan I was of this game, and others here loved it too... Except maybe Don and Sine.

Over to the following Millenia, in the 2000's, Mother 1 & 2 (Earthbound) were announced for the GBA. 2003 came, 10 years ago, and Nintendo finally released the two games on one cartridge... In Japan, and not in North America or Europe.

We released much art and figurines, and sent our Starmen.net beggers to Reggie. NOTHING!




2006 came and Earthbound came back into the picture because Mother 3 was announced for this year, and the Wii debuted Nintendo's Virtual Console service...

Years past, nothing, and more of nothing. Mother 3 never made it over here.

It might have been that there was just not the right ears hearing it. NoA definitely heard, NoE definitely heard, but where was the game?

Earlier this year, 2013, Nintendo launched a appetizer for the Wii U Virtual Console with a few games priced at 30 cents released over the first half of the year. We got F-Zero, Kirby's Adventure, Super Metroid's on the list, Punchout was a month ago, etc... Japan had a slightly different list... They had EARTHBOUND while North America and Europe did not. So how did the Miiverse respond?

How did the Miiverse respond?

By the TENS of THOUSANDS, we hit all of the Virtual Console communities with this:





It was a disorganized effort of European, North American, and surprisingly... The Japanese fans as well who sympathized with us were posting to the Miiverse. We were hitting them on all fronts.

Next Week the Wii U Virtual Console launches in full, and the games have been re-tooled to include Wii U and Miiverse functionality. Mr. Iwata launched a Nintendo Direct where he began to close with a statement about the VC, optimizations and new Wii U features, and the announcement and detailed several games including: Super Mario World, Kirby Superstar, Super Metroid, etc... This was expected, until he did that thing he does in almost all Nintendo Direct videos, and surprised us at the end of his speech, and showed some of the Miiverse Earthbound art and messages, and then followed that with the announcement of Earthbound for Europe and North America.

Yesterday was a big day for Earthbound fans! =)

Also Zelda fans, on that same Nintendo Direct, Oracle of Ages and Seasons was announced for Virtual Console on 3DS, and also Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past 2.

[SineSwiper]

Gee, it only took 20 frelling years.

[Oracle]

I'll just keep beating this game once to twice a year on my SNES/Emulators like I have been since the game was released.

I'm not buying a god damn Wii U just for this.

[Oracle]

I'm probably going to be by far the most excited person here on this one! =D

Only because Wii U is a necessity for this, otherwise I'd be right there with you.

[Zeus]

I'll just keep beating this game once to twice a year on my SNES/Emulators like I have been since the game was released.

Which emulator did you find that which allowed you to actually beat it?

[Oracle]

I'll just keep beating this game once to twice a year on my SNES/Emulators like I have been since the game was released.

Which emulator did you find that which allowed you to actually beat it?

Huh?

Zsnes, Snes9x, Snesoid for android....

[Zeus]

I'll just keep beating this game once to twice a year on my SNES/Emulators like I have been since the game was released.

Which emulator did you find that which allowed you to actually beat it?

Huh?

Zsnes, Snes9x, Snesoid for android....

I wonder if that's a more recent thing. For the longest time, any emulator which played it would actually run into a situation where the final dungeon would be INSANELY difficult and if you managed to make it to the end boss, it would stop in the middle of it, give you a message, and erase your saved game. That's one of the reasons the game is so insanely valuable on Ebay

[Eric]

Yeah they someone eventually uploaded a clean dump of the ROM Zeus so the game works fine.

[Zeus]

Well, I thought what the old one did was hilarious

[SineSwiper]

Well, I thought what the old one did was hilarious

Ouch. Though, messing with pirates in fun ways is nothing new:

The Dungeon used DataSoft's patented "weak bit" disk based copy protection scheme (which almost all games had some form of at this time). It worked by encoding invalid bit patterns in some disk sectors then at run time the software would read those sectors several times and make sure the bits were "flaky" (sometimes a 1 sometimes a 0). On the C-64 John Butrovich went one step farther by writing a special fast-loader DOS that lived inside the disk drive using overlays from track 0 within a giant sector that was physically too big to be created on a Commodore 1542 type disk drive (so it couldn't be duplicated on normal hardware). We didn't worry about people copying the C-64 version much, but with the Atari (and I think the Apple) we also added some subtle checks a various points during the game which would eventually cause pirated copies (and early buggy Atari 1.0 versions...Oops!) to force an encounter with FBI agents (who would make short work of adventures attacking with weapons like "the long arm of the law"). At this point I'm very glad to see cracked versions of AR up on the net. I just wish the PC emulators worked better (or at all) with them.

I remember when my parents played that the first pre-order copies of the game were buggy with the copy protection in that LEGIT copies were getting encounters by "FBI Agents". (Hence the early buggy ATARI versions comment above.)

Also, the copy protection for Dungeon Master was legendary. Chaos Strikes Back (the sequel) would randomly kill your whole party if it failed several fuzzy bit checks.

Though, it is rare to find that sort of thing with cart games.

[Julius Seeker]

It's out!
See you Monday =)