• Mother 1 + 2 for GBA, Japanese commercial (2.7 MB)
  
  
• Translated Commercial! (680 KB, MPEG4 format)
  (If the video doesn't play for you then you'll need to get the correct video codec from somewhere. Ask on the forums. BTW I updated the movie slightly.)
  
  
• Translated Screenshot from Commercial #1
  
  
• Screenshots from the Commercial
  
  
• Mention in Nintendo Power

Shigesato Itoi, EarthBound's creator, had some stuff to say about Mother 3 in a really recent interview on his own site. Click here if you know Japanese. I've started to translate all of his interview stuff but I'm just so busy and he talks so indecisively at times that it's really hard to exactly pin down a good translation. Other people have translated some of his stuff though. Unfortunately I don't have any links at the moment. If anybody out there has links to these translations, let me know.

To summarize his interview though, Itoi thought about doing it for the GBA after it was cancelled but wasn't sure about it, but after looking at several options like putting the story into book or movie form, the GBA seemed the best choice. Also with Mother 1 and 2 coming out everyone would naturally start asking when 3 was coming out again. He says he likes to think of it as being a game where you don't have to pull all nighters to play the game; you can pick it up and play it a little bit each day and still enjoy it. The feeling that I (Tomato) personally got from this is that it ISN'T one of those games where if you don't play it all in one sitting you'll never get around to finishing it. Just the contrary, you CAN play a lot at once but even if you don't you still won't lose interest in the game.

Okay, well the next part of the interview is up and in it he talks about Mother 1 + 2 and how it's rerelease came about. It's kind of interesting. If you can read Japanese, check it out here.

But in summary, people he knew would sometimes say, "Hey, why not port the games to the GBA? The screen size is enough," but he didn't really give it much thought at first. There were even some game dev. studios who were like, "Hey, let us do a port of the games for you!" but he turned them down. But the reason he decided to bring them back was because he has neither a Famicom nor a Super Famicom in his home anymore, so he can't play his own games, and probably most houses all over Japan no longer have either system as well. He felt like he was making the hardcore fans who were shelling out big money at used game stores go through weird stuff.

There was a really talented GBA dev. crew already there and waiting so he was practically like, "Here you go!" when he gave the project the green light. Also, for things like the library in Mother 2 where it says to return a book by a 2001 or something, he was thinking of changing such things to match the present date, but the dev. team commented how it'd be a lot better if they left everything as they were in the original games. After some thinking, he decided that he agreed. So there probably won't be any changes that made on purpose.

Itoi reveals other things in later parts of the interview. When he was working on Mother 1, he was living away from his daughter at the time. He never really got to see her, but the two would occasionally converse on the phone. This situation led him to create a similar situation in the Mother games where you never see your father but you have to talk to him on the phone to save your game or do other things.

He also reveals that Tony (Jeff's friend in Winters) is indeed homosexual. Also it appears that the Mr. Saturn were created as sort of the characters of "innocence", where they're not quite right but they mean well and are nice. The Mr. Saturn font (the Japanese Mr. Saturn font, anyway) is supposedly based on his daughter's handwriting at the time.