Earthbound Secrets Resurface >25 Years Later

Earthbound (also known as Mother), was released over 25 years ago. Due to some impressive forensics, some previously lost files from one of the game's translators were rediscovered.

The golden-age rebirth of console gaming, largely spurred by the NES's mega-success, has remained a

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. There's a whole community out there rushing to find documents, disks, and hard drives from the '80s and '90s before they're savaged by time and bit rot. Yet sometimes, those old storage standards' limitations can work out in game historians' favor.

On Friday, the Video Game History Foundation announced

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, as discovered by original

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translator Marcus Lindblom in 2018. The story sounds a lot like ones we've heard in the past, where someone from the gaming industry cleans out an attic or a storage unit only to find disks that they think are lost to time.

In Lindblom's case, he thought the Earthbound disk he'd discovered was lost to his own younger stupidity. At one point he learned, after putting it into an older computer, that he'd deleted the disk's contents to save other work on it. He donated the disk to VGHF with fingers crossed that they could work their magic, which they apparently did. As it turns out, only one small file had been saved to the disk after its "deletion," thus leaving most of the original magnetic media untouched. Forensic recovery tools managed to recover every single disk sector, revealing the SNES RPG's "complete" scripting files for English and Japanese text, along with related code for event triggers in the game.

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This kinda reminds me of the palelientologists who had a large data set of information on coal ball fossils stored on 8 inch floppies from the IBM 360 era, and no way to read the data. They werent even sure of the format either. Youtuber curiousmarc and his team helped them recover and interpret the valuable data.

Wow thats impressive they were able to actually pull the game in its entirety from the old floppy drive. I wonder what else might be able to be recovered with this information.

(06-06-2021, 12:24 AM)demonboy Wrote:

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Wow thats impressive they were able to actually pull the game in its entirety from the old floppy drive.

Indeed It Is Impressive.

Given the age of the disk and the number of overwritten data, they've done a great job with Its recovery.

Some of these are pretty funny. Wonder why they were cut from the original game. Having played Mother, it's bizarre to think so much was hidden beneath the surface.

It surfaced that were were discussions about releasing Mother 3 in the west (prior to Iwata's passing):

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15+ years later it's surprising they haven't, as

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already did the job for them.