PixlBit

Every once in awhile, the subject of "which cancelled video game do you wish had been released?" comes up. My answer to this subject is always the same

In 2006, Nintendo released Mother 3 (the immediate successor to the SNES cult RPG EarthBound) on the Game Boy Advance. Sadly, it has never officially made it out of Japan. However, Nintendo's surprise release of the 8-bit Mother 1 as EarthBound Beginnings on Wii U's Virtual Console - and I do mean surprise, since Nintendo announced it just hours before the game went live at 6 PM Pacific/9PM Eastern, complete with an introduction by Mother series creator Shigesato Itoi - has stoked the fires for a release of Mother 3 as well. Mother 3 had a long, tumultuous development. It was originally conceived as a Super Famicom game in 1994, the year before EarthBound/Mother 2 released in the US.

But in 1997, pictures and videos of a prototype Nintendo 64 version of Mother 3 surfaced, done in full 3-D graphics rather than top-down sprites.

The scenes above are from Tazmily Village, which is one of the early locations in the final GBA release of Mother 3. Most of the characters in the 3-D prototype made it into the final game as well. The character models are SD Gouraud-shaded models similar to the field character models used in Final Fantasy VII rather than the more sophisticated texture-mapped models in FF8 or FF9. However, where the Final Fantasy games used 3-D models on pre-rendered static backgrounds, Mother 3's environments were entirely real-time rendered as in the N64 Zelda games. It looked quite impressive. For owners of the RPG-starved Nintendo 64, the prospect of not just having a RPG but a potential N64 equivalent to Final Fantasy VII was exciting.

Sadly, it wasn't to be. A poor choice of software media and the team's lack of confidence in its ability to work with 3-D graphics doomed Mother 3 on N64.

Because of its size, Mother 3 was being developed for the ill-fated Nintendo 64 Disk Drive. Nintendo designed this peripheral in hopes that it would attract developers like Square, Capcom, Namco, and other companies desiring high-capacity storage formats that had shunned the Nintendo 64 because of its use of cartridges rather than CD-ROMs. The 64DD, when it finally did release, ended up having both a limited library and limited sales. In fact, Ocarina of Time was originally a proposed as a 64DD game with two add-on expansion packs, Ura Zelda and Zelda Gaiden. Thankfully, Nintendo came to its senses and released Ocarina of Time on cartridge so as not to limit the audience of the blockbuster game. Zelda Gaiden and Ura Zelda were reworked into Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time Master Quest respectively. Nintendo eventually made a cartridge large enough to hold Resident Evil 2, which came on 2 CD-ROMs on the PlayStation, but sadly they chose to scrap their work on Mother 3 altogether rather than put it on cartridge.

Ultimately, however, Mother 3's developers found 3-D graphics too difficult to work with for such an ambitious game, and Nintendo's increasing diversion of its resources towards its upcoming Gamecube console sealed "EarthBound 64"'s fate. In August 2000, Nintendo formally announced the game's cancellation, confirming many gamers' worst fears after over two years of no news on the game. Unfortunately, Nintendo also declined to rework the game as a Gamecube game. Instead, they finally decided to make the game for the Game Boy Advance, which was both cheaper and easier than making a Gamecube game would have been. Furthermore, the Game Boy Advance had a userbase several times that of the Gamecube, so that made even more financial sense. But sadly, no official US release.

Hopefully, the success of EarthBound on the Wii U's Virtual Console and the fact that Nintendo was willing to release its previously Japan-only Famicom predecessor means that Nintendo will at some point finally grace American shores with Mother 3.