It's Peanuts Time Again, Shigesato Itoi!

I’ve written about this before, as seen in a previous post. But on this, the final day of Starmen.net’s MOTHER fanfest, I think it’s appropriate to revisit the topic for just a few moments. After all, MOTHER deserves a little more love before we all put it away for another year!

With the original MOTHER title – known in some American circles as Earthbound Zero – series creator Shigesato Itoi crafted a video game for people who don’t necessarily enjoy traditional gaming experiences; a sort of “anti-video game.” Similarly, Peanuts by Charles Schultz caries the strange distinction of being both quintessential funny paper fodder and an anti-comic strip, rarely noted for its belly laughs but adored and venerated all the same by thousands and thousands of loyal readers. The strip’s got such staying power that as of 2011, it’s still being printed in hundreds of publications around the country, despite Schultz’s passing more than a decade earlier.

I don't know why he expected this time to be different.

So what could these two things possibly have in common that wasn’t already explored in “Its Itoi’s World, Charlie Brown?” Not much really; just a small tidbit I cut from the original essay. It’s something that I was reminded of when I finished MOTHER today.

It's a crumby game.

The more I ponder it, the more impossible I think it would be to make a “true” Peanuts game; a game that captures the essence of the comic strips and animated TV specials. There would be nothing to do in a Peanuts game but match philosophical wits with Linus, pay too much for psychological advice from Lucy, and have footballs pulled away just as you’re about to kick them. The only other choice is an action game starring that pudgy bald kid who’s falling down all the time. It would make as much sense as all those Garfield games that have everyone’s favorite lazy kitty doing triple flips over his neighbor’s fences and gallivanting through haunted houses. The few attempts at capturing Charlie Brown’s world on the gaming screen have been bizarre, Snoopy-based affairs like Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular for the NES in 1990, but it’s worth noting that in Japan, this game stars Donald Duck and a bunch of other Disney characters. If that doesn’t speak volumes on the genericness of the title, I don’t know what does.

I realized this long ago: MOTHER is a better Charlie Brown game than what was officially attempted with the Peanuts license – and probably anything that will ever come along in the future. Though the RPG genre isn’t an exact fit for good ol’ Chuck and the gang, it’s probably the best suited for that classic Peanuts dry humor and somewhat melancholy atmosphere.

Ninten at home.

Ironically, the greatest tribute to Schultz’s work was created 11 years before his death by a man who lives thousands of miles away from the birthplace of everyone’s favorite blockhead. Perhaps Shigesato Itoi understands American culture better than many of those living within her borders.

Or perhaps he just knows how to craft enjoyable games rife with dry humor and a somewhat melancholy atmosphere.

The REAL Greatest Game of All Time

Forget about that E.T. crap; this is the real deal. But you’ll still have to phone home.

When it hit American store shelves in June of 1995, Nintendo’s wacky SNES role playing game, Earthbound, was met with disappointing sales. Despite a generous amount of coverage in Nintendo Power magazine and an ad campaign that reportedly cost the Big N about $2 million, only about 140,000 copies of Earthbound found their way into the homes of eager Nintendo gamers. Compared to the 300,000 copies that made it into the hands of players in Japan and the fact that the RPG genre had yet to hit its stride in North America, 140,000 units might be considered a respectable performance. After all, games Final Fantasy II and III on the Super Nintendo met with similar success in the United States, though the actual numbers escape me right now.

Earthbound unboxed.

But then there’s this statement from Nintendo gaming guru Shigeru Miyamoto: “We had high hopes for Earthbound, the Super NES version, in the US, but it didn’t do well. We even did a TV commercial, thinking, ‘Hey… this thing could sell three million copies!’ But it didn’t.”

Suddenly, Nintendo’s reluctance to release the title on the Wii’s Virtual Console doesn’t seem as boneheaded.


Proof that EB's marketing was intended to cost $2 million. Borrowed from Earthbound Central.



Whether it was Nintendo’s poorly planned scratch ‘n sniff promotions of the game, the lukewarm (and frankly ill reasoned and written) reviews that criticized Earthbound’s “squashed” and “childish” graphics, or the fact that video games were transitioning to the world of three dimensions right as Earthbound hit the market, many American players missed out on one of the most touching, hilarious games ever. Known as MOTHER 2 in Japan, Earthbound is the coming of age story of a boy named Ness who, after being awoken one night by a meteor crashing practically in his backyard, discovers that it’s up to him and three friends he’s never met to save the world from the intergalactic menace known only as Giygas. Defying the typical RPG conventions of the time, Earthbound takes place in a postmodern world where baseball bats and frying pans replace swords and shields; hippies, drunken old men and scalding cups of coffee roam the streets looking for a fight; and to restore hit points, all one has to do is order a pizza. And if you’re feeling homesick, just give your mom a ring and you’ll get over it in a snap. Earthbound even came with its own strategy guide. Designed to look like a travel brochure, the guide quickly became an indelible part of the Earthbound experience.

Screens from the back of the box.

Many of the game’s unique situations and locales were based on the adventures of Japanese copywriter and TV celebrity Shigesato Itoi, who just so happens to have created the MOTHER series in the first place. For example, the “mole mine” in the Dusty Dunes Desert is based on a cave expedition Itoi took for a Japanese television program, and the final battle with the universal destroyer, Giygas, was inspired in part by a rape scene from a 1957 film called The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty, which a young Itoi was exposed to when he accidently entered the wrong movie theater.

Itoi

Yes, even though Earthbound is often light-hearted, Itoi cleverly approaches mature themes such as death, absentee parenting, homosexuality and psychological trauma as a father might explain them to his children. Other times the player is forced to face the facts with no one there to guide them, just like growing up in real life. It’s a potent metaphor for what many young adults, just like Ness and his friends, will endure as they reach adulthood. It’s especially meaningful for those who just entered the confusing corridors of teendom themselves, as I had the year the game was released.

Another of Shigeru Miyamoto’s pearls of wisdom, this time in reference to his inspiration for games like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros.: “What if you walk along and everything that you see is more than what you see – the person in the T-shirt and slacks is a warrior, the space that appears empty is a secret door to an alternate world? What if, on a crowded street, you look up and see something appear that should not, given what we know, be there? You either shake your head and dismiss it or you accept that there is much more to the world than we think. Perhaps it really is a doorway to another place. If you choose to go inside you might find many unexpected things.”

What else would you expect from a guy who
runs around like this all day?

It’s that kind of childlike wonder that made Miyamoto’s many masterpieces the hits they were; his own monuments to kiddom. Likewise, Earthbound is Itoi’s celebration of childhood, but not through the lens of the very young like Zelda or the original MOTHER game. Earthbound represents late childhood, where the world is still a wonderful and intriguing place, but there’s the creeping realization that society is in some way diseased; along with the burgeoning sense of romantic love comes the unease of sensing that there could be heartache right around the corner. Maybe that’s why I don’t much like MOTHER 3, Earthbound’s Japan-only sequel, because it’s the gaming equivalent of the transition from teen to adult. The carefree feelings of MOTHER and Earthbound are mostly absent in MOTHER 3, replaced with dread, pain, loss and a musical battle system that BAFFLES THE CRAP OUT OF ME, just like real life.

If you ever get the chance to play the underappreciated gem that is Earthbound, grab your controller, start whacking the local crazy animal population with baseball bats, and don’t look back. Even if you don’t agree with me that it’s the greatest game of all time (which it is), I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

In fact, here’s the perfect excuse to play Earthbound TODAY:



Starmen.net’s yearly Earthbound Fanfast and Funktastic Gamplay Event is where it’s at. Every two days, the player is told how far to advance in the game and everyone talks about their shared experiences on the message boards. It’s a great way to connect to other Earthbound players and an even better way to reconnect with the greatest game of all time. Also there’s prizes and prizes are fun.

So find those strategy guides, grab your Leave It to Beaver-style red hat and get crackin’, because you’ve got a world to save!

*   *   *

That'll do it for my top games list, but many of you have yet to tell me about YOUR favorite games of all time! If you haven’t, take a minute to post your top three games as a comment to this post. I’ll reveal the results in a future article here on Wordsmith VG!

USA Bound: The Resurrection of a Classic

When I was in college, I took a copyediting course that required participants to write one newspaper article per week. Most people wrote about how great the Starsky and Hutch movie is or long editorials on why being a waitress is difficult. I, on the other hand, was writing about how to prevent alien abductions through the judicious use of salt, people becoming so obsessed with the card game UNO that they stopped going to class, and of course, Earthbound.

The following is a feature story about the birth of Earthbound Zero. Although most of the quotes here are taken verbatim from text files and web sites, some of them are modified or reconstructed to make the story flow better. This is essentially what Steve Demeter (who's now super famous for his iPhone app Trism) said or wrote, but it is not exact, nor did I actually interview him. The idea was just to write an article in the newspaper style; it didn’t have to be completely true. That being said, all the FACTS within the article, such as names and dates, are correct to the best of my knowledge.

So read on, and learn the story behind this lost classic!

*      *      *

Steven Demeter, known on the internet as “Demi,” sits at his cluttered desk. He stares at his computer screen, a small, triumphant grin on his face. The phenomenon he was instrumental in creating has stretched across cyberspace, thriving first in remote corners of the Internet, and later, on mainstream web sites. He knows that hundreds of people are playing the game he brought to the public, the game that wasn’t supposed to exist. As Demi sits back, hands behind his head, he knows that classic video game fans everywhere are playing Earthbound Zero.

“I’ve told this story so many times to so many people already, one last time won't hurt,” Demi said. In May of 1989, Nintendo of Japan published a game called MOTHER for the Japanese equivalent to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The quirky game, starring a psychic young boy and his wacky friends, quickly became a bestseller. Nintendo had planned to translate and release the game in the United States in the spring or winter of 1991, but for reasons Nintendo never officially revealed to the public, it was canceled before distribution.

Most gamers forgot about the cancellation as time went on, especially after the summer of 1995, when the United States received an English translation of MOTHER 2 (called Earthbound in the U.S.). Thus, when a fully-translated English prototype copy of MOTHER appeared for auction on the newsgroup rec.games.video.classic in January of 1998, the Internet gaming community let out a collective gasp of disbelief.

Demi, a skilled hacker, had planned for nearly a year on doing an unofficial translation of MOTHER. Using a computer program that emulates the inner workings of a real NES, people can play copied games, existing as pure code, on their computer. This allowed Demi to obtain and translate any available NES game he chose. His translation group, Neo Demiforce, had already translated several Japanese language games into English in the past, including the legendary Final Fantasy II.

When he heard of the English MOTHER prototype, Demi became very excited. “This was indeed very cool to hear. A prototype,” mused Demi, “is the holy grail as far as unofficial hacking and translating goes.” He made up his mind to obtain and copy the rare game, then release it to the public. By then, however, the prototype had already been sold to a private NES memorabilia collector for the relatively small sum of $125. The seller, Greg Mariotti, would reveal neither where he obtained the prototype cartridge, nor who had purchased it from him. The Neo Demiforce was out of luck.

But thankfully for the classic gaming community, things are not always what they seem.

A screen shot from the NES Earth Bound Prototype

“This is where the story takes a weird turn,” said Demi. “After a month or so, we finally managed to find out the e-mail address of the guy who bought the prototype cartridge.” However, the new owner, NES collector Kenny Brooks, was reluctant to allow the game to be copied through a process called “dumping,” fearing that the value of the original cartridge would decrease dramatically if it were widely available for download.

“A deal was struck for $400; $200 up front, and another $200 after we finished dumping the game,” explained Demi. After he copied it, the cartridge was to be sent back to Brooks.

Ninten, MOTHER

There was a slight problem: Demi and his associates couldn’t spare so much money in such a short amount of time. However, Earthbound fans are an unusually dedicated bunch. Within days of posting the request on their web site, funds began trickling in. Soon, Neo Demiforce had enough cash to pay for the game. “It made me feel good to see the players stick together like that,” said Demi, adding, “It proves that we’re more than just gamers, we’re a real community.”

In an ironic contrast to the weeks of waiting leading up to it, receiving and copying the prototype went strikingly fast.

“The cash was mailed on 4/22/98, the buyer sent the game on 4/25, and the game was copied, hacked, and released on 4/27,” said Demi. “Once we had the money, things went so fast it made my head spin.” A few minor alterations had to be made to the game’s code to get it working properly on the popular emulators of the time, but thanks to the skilled hacking of several dedicated programmers, it was all completed in a matter of days.

Reactions on the Internet were swift. Earthbound fans jumped at the chance to play the prequel, christened Earthbound Zero by Neo Demiforce to avoid confusion with the English MOTHER 2 translation, and the game quickly appeared on countless web sites for download. News of Earthbound Zero even appeared in several well known video game magazines, including Gamepro and Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Thanks to a hacker’s desire to bring a special game to fans and the unprecedented support from the gaming community, Earthbound Zero has gone from obscure legend to magnificent reality.

“To all of you who helped, just let me say thanks,” said Demi. “Thank you so much for having the guts to invest in something as shaky as this and helping not only the Earthbound series to live on, but also the universal trust of people like us.”

Of Rusted Bikes and Faceless Dreamers

The other day, I saw a picture of the “Mach Pizza” air freshener you could have received if you guessed the mystery smell on one of the cards in the back of the Earthbound player’s guide, and something dawned on me: Not many people got their hands on one of those. Nobody I knew sent in that card, because none of us wanted to deface our player’s guide. Many of the copies of Earthbound I see on eBay say they have the cards intact, which means the sellers didn’t sent away for it either. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if fewer than 20,000 air fresheners were made, and only a fraction of those are still in existence today.

The more I pondered the situation, the more I stared at the picture of that lonely, forgotten air freshener, the sadder I felt. The more I looked at it, the creepier that little Mach Pizza man looked until I shut down the browser and did something else.

This isn’t the first time something Earthbound related has done this to me. I’ve played Earthbound Zero plenty of times with no problems. But like that Mach Pizza air freshener, things go awry when I start thinking too much. Every once in a while, when I’m playing EBZ at night, and the house is silent as a tomb, strange ideas slither into my subconscious and burst into my waking thoughts.

We were fortunate enough to have gotten our hands on the Earthbound Zero (MOTHER 1) prototype, I’ll think, but what else we don’t know about? How much of my childhood did Nintendo quietly cancel because it wouldn’t have brought in enough of a return on their investment?

Paranoia – the mild kind, not enough to make me stop playing, but enough to make me uneasy – washes over me. “I shouldn’t be playing this. This game… doesn’t exist,” I say.

And yet, it clearly does. It defies logic.

People I’ve never met before – faceless, nameless people – put hundreds of hours of their lives into creating Earthbound Zero for me; for us. Yet they’re nothing but names in the credits. I saw a picture of the game’s translator once. The man’s name was Phil Sandhop. He was smiling. I wonder if he even remembers the day the picture was taken.

Phil Sandhop, 1989

I’m sorry your game never got the release it deserved, Mr. Sandhop. I want you to know you did a great job on it and I really enjoyed it. Tell me, though: Would you have worked on the project as hard as you did if you knew what fate had in store for it?

Everyone else I can’t thank, because I don’t remember their names, I’ve never seen their faces, and they probably don’t speak my language anyway. They are faceless, nameless people who once dreamt of making the English translation of MOTHER 1 great.

When I was about four years old, my mother used to take me for walks through the woods about a quarter mile from my house. At the end was a street that led back to civilization. But right before the intersection, just steps away from the road home, a stream ran next to the street. Inside the stream was a small, rusted bike. The steam flowed over it like it had always been there, like it was some sort of natural debris.

Earthbound Zero, even though it was lovingly crafted, even though it was nurtured and had a chance to mature, never made it out Nintendo’s door. Like that rusty bike in the brook next to the street, it never fulfilled its true purpose. Like the rusty bike, the trees grew around it so it was obscured; no one could see it anymore, and everyone forgot about it. I’ll wager that aside from my mother, I’m the only one who remembers that bike anymore. If a one-in-a-million chance hadn’t brought the English MOTHER 1 prototype to us via emulation, Earthbound Zero might as well have been tossed into the stream next to that bicycle. Even with the way it is now, one can only wonder how many people who otherwise would have loved it missed out on such a wonderful game.

And that, I realize, is why that innocent-looking Mach Pizza air freshener made me feel so sad and creeped out: It never really did what it was made to do. Nobody really had one, and most people who did probably left it in the package or threw it out. While it’s just a piece of scented cardboard, it represents someone’s thoughts and creative actions that were, for the most part, ignored and lost in the stream of time.

So if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pull an ancient bicycle out of a brook.

Back to School Week: The Learning Game Vol. 1

Welcome back, suckaz!

If you're an American between the ages of five and 17 years old, I'm sorry. About 95 percent of you either went back to school last week or you'll be frantically buying a new wardrobe today or tomorrow and marching back into a classroom sometime in the next 72 hours. I feel your pain; I'm a certified English Language Arts teacher and if the economy hadn’t taken a headshot or 17 recently, I'd probably be captain of my first classroom right now instead of selling computers at Best Buy.

No more Thrill Kill!?

Your parents probably told you that you can’t play as many video games during the school year as you did during the scorcher days of the summer, which is a total bummer. And for you old people out there like me, just imagine how it would feel if someone told YOU that you can’t play Street Fighter every night! ...wait, that's called college. So to anyone lamenting the loss of their gaming hours, keep your chin up high and take note: There are people out there who think gaming holds an important place on the classroom.

One of them is me.

Last year I created a blog called “The Learning Game” as part of a grad school class. The blog focused on how video games could be intertwined with education to form something that the student AND the teacher could get excited about. In honor of students everywhere going back to school, I’ve imported and enhanced the The Learning Game to Wordsmith VG in its entirety. Think of it as the difference between the original Metroid on the NES and the Metroid: Zero Mission remake on the Gameboy Advance, only this time instead of stupid alien space pirates taking over some alien planet, it’s all gravy. Besides, you’re getting two posts a day, which is more than 1.99 times more words for you to read (or ignore)!

Pull up a chair and get ready to learn something from, class.

He's FROM SPACE, dude.

The Value of Gaming in Education

Examine the possibility of video games making the move from entertainment to educational. It's still far off, but the idea is much more feasable than it was 10 years ago.

Just a tad different from the book.

Les Misérables: The Fighting Game

You know, every classic novel should be converted into a fighting game.  This one is more entertaining than a garbage truck full of angry Frenchmen!


Extra Credit Bonus Link: It’s Itoi’s Word, Charlie Brown!

If you’ve got some time to spare after class, take a gander at this essay comparing the world of Shigasato Itoi’s Famicom (NES) classic MOTHER 1 to the endeavors of Charles Shultz’s Peanuts characters. There’s more than meets the eye going on here in this progressively poingent essay. It was the first post here on Wordsmith VG, so if you missed it, now's your chance to get a little more studying in!

I made the MOTHER series! LOVE ME.

Earthbound Zero: Know Your Roots

It’s hard for many of us to not get caught up in the excitement of the recent MOTHER 3 Fanfest, hosted by Starmen.net. If you’re reading this, either you enjoy MOTHER games enough to read essays about them, or something went horribly wrong while you were surfing the net, and you crashed-landed, cold and confused, on my virtual doorstep. (For the latter – keep reading anyway; it’ll make me feel loved.) I’m assuming you’re here because you just finished MOTHER 3 along with the fanfest and are rabidly soaking up any and all MOTHER information as a sort of conclusion to the fun. But let me ask you what might sound like an odd question, given the circumstances: What did you think of MOTHER 1 or as some know it, Earthbound Zero? Have you finished it? Have you ever played it?

Buried deep within the abyss that is my closet, I have a T-shirt that I wore so much, the stitching started to unravel and one could see my armpit through the sizable hole it left. On the front was an 8-bit Nintendo controller, with the words “Know your Roots!” scrawled across the bottom. MOTHER 2 might have been the only installment of the series we’ve officially seen (and probably ever will see) in English, but MOTHER 1 has been available, just as Nintendo was planning to release it in the United States, for more than a decade now. There’s nothing wrong with being excited about MOTHER 3 – especially after the fanfest – but if you still haven’t played the original, you’re missing out on an indispensable part of the MOTHER trilogy.

Every summer, devoted MOTHER fans everywhere break out their copies Earthbound and their likely-decaying Super NES control decks to participate in Starmen.net’s Earthbound Funktastic Gameplay Event, with MOTHER 3 getting the limelight this year with its own fanfest. Yet, no one has never had a playthrough event for the title that started it all, MOTHER 1. So ponder this: Wouldn’t it be awesome if everyone banded together for the first ever Earthbound Zero Fanfest? We could call it the “Know Your Roots Campaign.” Like previous fanfests, we would only need about 30 days of gameplay points for the event, so hopefully it wouldn’t be as much work to set up as one might think.

But like I’ve said before on this blog, you don’t have to wait for Starmen.net to have a gameplay event before you can enjoy the MOTHER series. If you’ve never played MOTHER 1 much (or at all), give it a whirl – I think you’ll like what you find. And even if you’ve finished MOTHER 1 before, load it up and walk around for an hour; take in the sights and sounds of a surreal adventure that smacks of a childhood you once knew.

It’s time to know your roots.

(Earth)Bound and Gagged: Censorship in the Mother Series

If you ever find yourself strolling around in the world of Earthbound, walking up and down on the same patch of grass and saying the same two lines of dialogue all day, you’d better hope you don’t get hurt, because you’re going to have a tough time finding a hospital. They’re there, but you’d never know which building to go to in a state of panic: All the red crosses that designate which buildings are hospitals don’t exist in the English version of the game. And if you’re Christian, you’d better hope you never die, because you won’t be allowed to have a crucifix on your grave. Well, at least there won’t be much to clean up though, because in Earthbound, you’re not allowed to bleed.

But why? What strange force stands between the citizens of Earthbound and these three seemingly unrelated aspects of life? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not Giygas who’s doing it, and it’s certainly not Master Belch. Give up?

It’s Nintendo of America, of course.

Especially in the days of the NES and SNES, the Big N was infamous for their super strict content guidelines that governed what could and could not be placed in a Nintendo approved video game. These restrictions were only imposed on games released in America and Europe; Japan had no such guidelines. This led to a problem: Many things that are perfectly acceptable in Japan – cartoony nudity, a splash of blood here and there, or some mild foul language, for example – could be seen as lewd, violent or otherwise inappropriate by persons living in the United States. So what’s a game developer to do when localizing a potentially offensive product?

For anyone releasing games on a Nintendo console from 1988 to the late ‘90s, this conundrum was only made worse thanks to Nintendo of America’s Video Game Content Guidelines. Nintendo was, and still is to some extent, highly protective of their squeaky clean, family entertainment image. The company refused to approve any game that came their way if it didn’t rigorously adhere to their regulations. “Nintendo of America's priority is to deliver high quality video game entertainment for our customers,” the policy states. “Nintendo is concerned that our products do not contain material that society as a whole deems unacceptable.”

The ten guidelines that followed expressly prohibited sexually suggestive or explicit content, extreme violence and graphic depictions of death, religious symbols or ideologies, profanity, drug or alcohol use, and anything else the company might deem “indecent.” Back when the NES was the only game in town, Nintendo’s word was law. They enforced their rules with extreme prejudice, and forced programmers to remove or alter anything that the Big N found unacceptable, lest the developer’s game go unreleased.

Regardless of the merits of Nintendo’s guidelines, the company usually stuck to them – even in their own programs. But for every justifiable cut, tweak or act of censorship, it seems that there were two or three more that make no sense. Inconsistency was a hallmark of Nintendo’s rules, and the Earthbound series was not spared from the censor’s unfocused knife. For example, there’s an enemy in Earthbound Zero called “Gang Zombie” who wears a hat, tie and suit jacket, as if he were a member of a Mafia-like organized crime ring. But in the original Japanese game, Mother, the Gang Zombie bled from his chest, as if he had been shot several times. So according to Nintendo’s guidelines, rotting corpses shambling about and attempting to devour preteen heroes is fine, but a bit of blood on their torn clothes is completely out of the question.

In Earthbound on the SNES, similarly contradictive edits were made. At one point early in the game, a father brings his two boys upstairs to punish them, and a sound effect, as if the children were being spanked, is played. However, in the Japanese version of the game, the effect sounds more “painful” and less comical. Odd edits like these were peppered throughout the series, removing bars but keeping the drunken people inside, taking away blood but not violence, cutting out cigarettes but mentioning strip joints, and more.

We’ll probably never have an official translation of the final game in the series, Mother 3, but it begs the question: Would Nintendo have doled out the same kind of wacky edits, or would the more liberal gaming climate of the late 2000s have spared a lot of questionable material from the cutting room floor? We’ll likely never know, so all I can say is this: Good luck finding a hospital if you need one and don’t have too much “expresso” at Jackie’s Café – those caffeine hangovers are a real bummer

It's Itoi's World, Charlie Brown

For a kid who can’t do anything right, Charlie Brown sure does know how to capture the hearts of a nation.

Oct. 2, 1950, the first Peanuts comic strip ran in seven newspapers. Since then, Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang have become cultural icons, as synonymous with American culture as baseball, apple pie and the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Charlie Brown’s animated exploits are now an indelible part of our holidays, and rarely does a Christmas, Thanksgiving or Halloween go by without the likes of Linus, Snoopy and Peppermint Patty performing their yearly rituals on our television screens. Even before passing away from the complications of colon cancer in February of 2000, Charles Schulz, creator of Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang, was an American legend.

However, it seems that the unlucky kid in the yellow shirt and his precocious beagle have been an inspiration to more than just the people of the United States.

Approximately 7000 miles away from the land of Rock n’ Roll, Superman and I Love Lucy lives Shigesato Itoi, one of the most talented writers Japan has ever produced. During the late 80s, Itoi found himself leading a new project for the Japanese electronics giant, Nintendo. In yet another new situation of his already eclectic career, Itoi’s first foray into the video game market was to use the formula of the massively popular Dragon Quest series of video games, but present a story and style completely counter to what Dragon Quest had been delivering to eager players for the past three years. Instead of a testosterone-laden title dealing with dragons and glory, Itoi named his game after the gentle woman who raised us all: Mother. Friendly neighbors and typical kids next door littered the urban landscape, and in place of swords, castles and brawny warriors from the “times of yore” were baseball bats, shopping malls, and four young American children who set out to save the world from an alien invasion – or have fun trying.

According to Phil Sandhop, head of the unreleased English translation of Mother, Itoi’s game was designed to have a Peanuts “feel” in both the graphics and gameplay. Apparently, it was the programmers’ intent to make Mother seem more authentically American by alluding to one of the United States most cherished creations. After all, what could be more American than good ol’ Charlie Brown?

“I don’t believe that [Mother] was meant to directly copy Peanuts,” Sandhop explained in an interview with the retro-gaming website The Lost Levels, “but that’s what the designers knew the typical Japanese game player would perceive to be a typical American boy growing up outside a small town.”

Although as Sandhop suggests, the game is far from a mere copy of Schulz’s comic strip, the Schulzian influence on Mother is undeniable. At first glace, Mother could easily be mistaken for a Charlie Brown game. Ninten, the game’s main character, doesn’t just look like Charlie Brown; he almost IS Charlie Brown. From his bulbous nose and boyish grin to his slightly chubby stomach and cartoony, oval feet, Ninten is the spitting image of everyone’s favorite blockhead. The only difference is Ninten’s trademark red hat and a blue – not yellow – t-shirt. Furthermore, many of the locales that he and his friends travel to in Mother, like small, rural homes and an unassuming elementary school, could have flowed directly from Schulz’s pen.

But the similarities aren’t limited to just Ninten and the game’s landscape: One look at some of the other inhabitants of the world of Mother conjures memories of Chuck and the gang as well. One female character Ninten encounters during his journey wears glasses and has short, black hair, just like Peppermint Patty’s yes-woman, Marcie. Another character is surrounded by a perpetual cloud of dust and has a mass of unkempt, “naturally curly” locks. He (or possibly she) is a cross between Fredia, a girl who appears briefly in A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Pigpen, a chronically filthy yet perpetually polite young man of the Peanuts universe.

In Earth Bound, the Marcie look-alike sports pigtails instead of her old, Schulz-inspired hairdo, and the Pigpen-like character has cleaned up his act, losing the dust cloud completely. As Sandhop said in his Lost Levels interview, the revisions were probably made during the translation process to “make the game Peanut-less,” for fear that a Schulz lawsuit might spring up otherwise. Yet, in a seemingly counterproductive move, Ninten was reworked to receive a very Charlie Brownesque stripe on his shirt. (Good grief, Nintendo! Make up your minds!)

One of the hallmarks of Schultz’s comic is the fact that the youngsters often act like the adults, revealing deep thoughts and saying poignant words, yet they still display the qualities inherent in all children. While kids in the Peanuts world drag around security blankets, play football, and worry about homework, they also ponder the true meaning of life in very mature ways.

Once again, Itoi takes a page out of Charlie Brown’s book with the children of Mother. While they are saddled with the gargantuan task of defeating an evil alien presence, just like the Peanuts gang, Ninten and his friends still find time to interact with other kids their own age, enjoy a home cooked meal, go to school and develop their first crushes.

Part II: “I don’t believe in pain.”

It all begs a very simple question: Why? Aside from the American flavor Itoi was searching for, why was Peanuts such an influence on Mother? Itoi isn’t one to haphazardly throw elements into his games, as evidenced by the harrowingly long development cycles they often go through. With this in mind, we are left with several unanswered questions: Did Itoi have other motives in adding many Schulzian elements to Mother? And if so, what were they?

In an interview with journalist Charles T. Whipple entitled “Words of Wisdom,” Itoi remarked, “I don't believe in pain. I don't believe things should be difficult. I don't believe perseverance conquers all.” Although Itoi was talking about his own philosophy, it’s interesting to note that this is basically the underlying ideology of the Peanuts comics in a nutshell. Every year, Lucy sets up the football, telling Charlie Brown that she’ll actually allow him to kick it this time – and every year, poor Charlie Brown winds up flat on his back, wondering why he always falls for the same trick. Linus forgoes Trick-or-Treating each Halloween to wait in the pumpkin patch for a visit from the Great Pumpkin, but all he ever gets is a cold and a broken heart. And Snoopy is constantly trying his hand at being an author, yet everything he writes is barely fit to line Woodstock’s birdcage.

There are many more examples, but Schulz’s lesson is clear: There is such a thing as too much perseverance. Many Peanuts strips and television specials illustrate the consequences of this – namely, unnecessary pain and unhappiness. Charles Shultz wasn’t telling the people of America to never try to reach a goal nor attempt to better themselves; he was simply saying that after trying our best again and again, there eventually comes a time to move on. Like Linus tells Charlie Brown when he blows the spelling bee in the film Snoopy Come Home, “And the world didn’t come to an end, did it, Charlie Brown?”

Itoi has definitely applied this philosophy to his own life. Through much of the 90s, Itoi put his heart and soul into crafting Mother 3, even moving it to the lesser Nintendo 64 platform when the company abandoned the N64 Disk Drive. But as the end of the N64’s life span drew near, however, the humble Itoi knew it was time to put his baby on ice. The cancellation came as a huge shock to Mother fans, but the project was becoming increasingly unfeasible and was causing Itoi much hardship and pain. It hurt him greatly that he was disappointing his fans, but it would have hurt much more to rush the project thought to completion and deliver a substandard product.

Knowing this, it’s not a stretch to infer that even during his work on the original Mother, Itoi lived by his “too much perseverance causes harm” philosophy. There’s probably no better representation of this ideology in the U.S. than Schulz’s comic characters, and Itoi knew Japanese players already associated Peanuts with the small town America setting of Mother. It only made sense then, for both Itoi and the players, for Itoi to reference his kindred spirit, Charles Schulz, on the video screen.

Part III: Itoi’s Charlie Brown Nation?

Does this mean Itoi views America as a carefree world akin to Charlie Brown’s? Put simply, no. However lightheartedly they do so, Mother games often delve into human nature – and the results are less than flattering to mankind. The series is rife with humanity acting badly, from miserly band managers and power mad policemen to self-serving politicians and gangs of wayward teens. Itoi may be a dreamer, but he’s far too intelligent to think that the innocence of a Charlie Brown lifestyle could exist fulltime on a planet full of hate, war and money.

More likely, the Peanuts-like world of Mother is the way Itoi wishes America – and for that matter, life itself – were. How wonderful it would be if the only woes we ever faced were simplistic, childlike difficulties, and the answers to our problems always lied within ourselves!

How wonderful indeed – especially for a man like Shigesato Itoi, who has plenty of problems and questions he can’t answer on his own. When Itoi was young, his parents were divorced. Later, Itoi rallied against Japanese tradition and left his school, Hosei University, in his late teens. Branded an outcast by society, Itoi was left with nowhere to go but the streets. Most people would have turned to their family for help – but, with the divorce, Itoi's family had been shattered; besides, he had quit University. How could he ever go home now?

It was kind of like Trick-or-Treating all night and coming home with a bag full of rocks.

"I got a rock."

In the end, the world of Mother has little to do with America or even Charlie Brown, although it does resemble it. No, Mother isn’t about Charles Schulz or Peanuts, it’s the video representation of what Itoi wishes his childhood had been. With a broken-up family, an unwillingness to attend University like everyone else, and no place to call his own, Itoi was forced to grow up fast.

Through playing his games and examining his other works, it’s easy to see what an introspective man Itoi is. It should come as no surprise, then, that Mother is just another part of Itoi’s endless search for answers; or at the very least, comfort. His hunt for fulfillment and his desire for the “normal” family he missed out on in his younger years led Itoi to create an alternate childhood, a better one, for himself – and anyone else who was looking for one as well. Ninten's got everything one could ask for – a sister, a loving mother, and a father who works hard to support his family – and now, so could Itoi.

A person’s mother is supposed to be the one who will always love them no matter what. Fittingly, Mother was Itoi’s labor of love; unlike most other video games of the time (and current games, for that matter), Mother wasn’t a generic piece of crap slammed together in six months for the sole purpose of generating profits. Itoi's opus was a gift to anyone who never had someone to call mom or dad, or those who came from a broken family. In fact, it was surrogate mother for everyone who needed one, regardless of why. Like the exploits of Charlie Brown, Mother presented players with a kinder view of life they could escape into whenever they choose.

Part IV: A Boy Named Shigesato Itoi

The first animated Peanuts special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, originally aired on CBS in the winter of 1965, when Itoi was about 17 years old. Near the end of this now-classic holiday tale, Charlie Brown is asked to bring back “a great big shiny aluminum Christmas tree” to be placed on stage during the children’s Christmas play. But good ol’ Charlie Brown goes with his heart, and instead of purchasing a more commercial product, he returns with a sickly, yet natural Christmas tree. At first, everyone is appalled with his choice. “I told you he’d goof it up. He’s not the kind you can depend on to do anything right,” says one little girl. “You’re hopeless, Charlie Brown,” adds another.

However, the Peanuts gang soon gives the little tree a second chance. “It’s not bad at all, really. It just needs a little love,” says Linus. They gather around and decorate it, and the once pathetic little tree stands beautiful and mighty.

In 1965, Itoi was a lot like that sad little tree. He was drifting through life aimlessly, with little hope. But, like that Charlie Brown tree, all he needed was “a little love” to blossom into something beautiful. By quitting University, Itoi had failed as far as conventional wisdom went; but after attending night school, putting in a lot of hard work, and a little help from his friends, he blossomed into one of the most sought-after copywriters in Japan. Soon, the kid who had dropped out of school was on televisions across Japan, reporting, hosting game shows, and more. And eventually, he would take the helm of the Mother series, a set of games that would inspire not only the people of Japan, but also fans in America. Against all odds, Itoi had become a Japanese cultural icon.

You know something? For a kid who couldn't do anything right, Shigesato Itoi sure knows how to capture the hearts of a nation.

AAUGH! RATS! WORKS CITED!

Charlie Brown Christmas, A. 1965. Paramount.
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. 1966. Paramount.
Offical Peanuts Website, The. (2005) Retrieved 12 Apr 2006.
Starmen.net. Retrieved 12 Apr 2006.
Whipple, Charles T. “Words of Wisdom.” Retrieved 12 Apr 2006.
Wirth, Jonathan. “Spotlight Earthbound.” (2003) Retrieved 12 Apr 2006.