The "Flintstones feel" mentioned by a playtester seems to tie into the tone and art style. A lot of mid 1900s Hanna Barbara cartoons had a dirty, empty look to them because of how quickly they were rushed out. Considering that the MOTHER 3 N64 team was very inexperienced in 3D, and looking at what little public screenshots and footage there is, it seems that this is what he meant- it has a primitive look and feel due to the inexperience of the team behind it.
I have a strong feeling Kumatora was supposed to die like the other Magipsies in the release game, given her unused animation. Makes more sense now how Flint would be present in the final dungeon.
Really do hope the gods shine upon us and a Earthbound 64 prototype is found so we can see it in all of its glory. Awesome video, I love hearing about this game and what could have been, also I really like your pfp lol.
@@JosuhI don't think so. Zelda 64's beta had Link in towns with big buildings because Nintendo was testing the limits of how far they could push the hardware. I assume MOTHER 64 would have more realistic expectations and have the buildings scale down.
Great vid. the mother 3 we got was still a masterpiece but man it seemed as though the n64 version was alot more ambitious in its scale what would it have been like? I find it fascinating we've never stumbled upon images of the masked man or Porky. How would things be different if this game released.
It's so bizarre that Nintendo seems to have some kind of obligation to keep any info pertaining to Mother 3 64 under wraps. What's the harm in releasing some concept art at least? I feel like Nintendo has some kind of weird idea that showing any footage of a game prior to it's release would undermine the final product in some way, as there is so little development information about any of Nintendo's games that was actually released by Nintendo. What a shame, and I hope someone finds a prototype one day. I really hope a collector isn't sitting on a prototype full of EPROMs, or a N64DD disk. The lifespan of the data on those is finite, and we've seen collectors hoard prototypes thinking only about their value and giving no thought to preservation.
In terms of the Eagleland/New Pork City screenshots, my belief was always that rather than Leder just vaguely telling you that the people of the Nowhere Islands moved there because they couldn’t live anywhere else, you were actually at one point going to travel beyond the Nowhere Islands and see/learn in greater detail what happened to the rest of the world that caused everyone to have to move to the Nowhere Islands. That’s always been my theory though the New Pork City thing makes sense too
This was a really good and interesting video! EarthBound 64's one of those betas that really interests me tbh, and I definitely think you did a good job explaining the iceberg
Here's an interesting observation: Notice how the new age retro hippie is shown travelling in a pig drawn wagon in one screenshot? There's unused text in the final game about a healer living in Item guy's wagon....
Ever since a lot of the beta OOT assets resurfaced in 2020 or 2021 i think it was i've been really hoping something similar happens with a Mother 3 prototype, it might never happen but theres been a lot of N64 leaks fairly recently so theres always hope imo
My theory is that the Tazmily theme was replaced by Sorrowful Tazmily/Mind of a Thief. All songs that use the Tazmily theme melody are from scenes that appeared in the eb64 trailer and screenshots like salsa's delivery service and the final battle with porky. It also appears in one of dcmc's songs, but the song is cut off in the final game. We know for a fact that dcmc was around since the beginning There may also have been a cut chapter involving flint and the boys going about their daily life in Tazmily. That would explain why the unused theme is in the jukebox.
Depends on what rules apply to the time travel, since we still aren't seeing Earthbound 64, it's almost safe to assume that the timeline remains unchanged and a new one got the game 😔
Thanks everyone for all the support on this video, I have another EB64 discussion video in the works. For now, here’s an invite to a new EarthBound 64 discord! discord.gg/5f6cM6j6mq
17:46 I feel like there’s still a prototype out there, there has to be. My guess is that maybe Itoi has it or it’s in Hal’s archives. Nintendo themselves are really good about archiving prototypes, betas, and source codes if the giga leaks was anything to go off of. I’d say our chances of seeing it depends on a potential new giga leak. If they found other lost prototypes of games we haven’t seen before, then I have no doubt in my mind that Mother 64 is in their archives.
I still dream of the day that the Earthbound/Mother 64 beta/prototype leaks, without a doubt it will be the biggest leak in gaming history, maybe even bigger than StarFox 2 and Luigi in Super Mario 64.
Did anyone notice Scamp's ghost in the Itoi screenshots? In mother 3, scamp is a random old man who dies during the time skip and never really serves any purpose. In the Itoi screenshots, Scamp can be seen in the background of a photo with his family (He looks different, kind of like dampe from Zelda) and later as a ghost. Edit: upon closer inspection, it's not Scamp, but Wess! Would mother 3 have ghosts like in earthbound? Or did Wess die at some point?
I think Mother 64 was just going to have party members turn into ghosts, especially since Wess is shown KOed in a battle with the Pork Trooper that came with the same batch of screenshots (Also, Wess was going to be a bigger party member)
@@Josuh an Earthbound inspired game released on 25 dec. 2020, which is a psychological horror game. while the game does have some pacing issues it is still a very good 20 hour experience
Thank you for making this video! Earthbound 64 lives in my head rent free so coming to know information I didn't have idea was floating around is pretty cool (even wiki articles and looking on the web doesnt show you stuff like this), if we got a couple prototypes from SpaceWorld already I am expecting an Earthboung 64 demo to surface one day... Reading interviews you can tell a lot of work and love was put into E64 so I thank you for compiling all of this and explaining it!
This game has me crazy. That french magazine stated that it would launch some day. My theory is that either it would've not been as long as the final game, or bits of the story were changed/later added on the final GBA launch. Probably the story was more lighthearted, or maybe it was just the same.
Thank you for making this video. I've been a MOTHER 3 fan for over 10 years now and I am so happy new information is still coming out about the beta. I hope some day the beta will be leaked and we can experience Itoi's original vision for the game.
As a Mother 3 fan, I find the Mother 64 info very fascinating and interesting especially on how it differed from the final GBA Mother we have now. It's unfortunate that we don't have more information and footage on the game but fingers crossed we'll one day find what we're looking for
I still would have preferred the N64 over the GBA version. The N64 has an charming aesthetic look. I don't know if the composed sounds for the EB64 were reused for the GBA version but it clearly was a masterpiece.
Your content is underrated, I was going into this thinking this was going to be surface level information, and my god was I wrong. I didn't know any of this stuff. Thanks man this was a good time!
What's sad is while Mother 3 on the GBA was and still is a great game it seems that the n64 version was going to be much larger in scale. The GBA version pretty much streamlined the story and content to be better condusive to a portable gaming experience. A ton of the cuts were probably on Flint's involvement and the Ending. In the GBA version Flint for example shows up out of the blue around the end while in EB64 it would have been less jarring cause he was more involved in the story.
This is really cool. I appreciate having all this stuff compiled together as others said and there's a lot I've never seen. I love how an iceberg on an unreleased game can exist too lol.
hey, we eventually got the zelda overdump and that was already thought to not exist. so maybe someday we will have some remnants on some yet unknown dev cart
Crazy how Mother 3 is one of the best games ever made and the US release is a fan-translated romhack of an N64 game that was scrapped and downgraded into a GBA game
the more i hear about mother 3/earthbound 64 the more i wish we actually had it in some form ;; i yearn for someone to find whatever development they had someday, but i doubt we'll ever get it :(
That’s not necessarily true, I think what that interview meant was that while yes the general outline was the same (Flint loses his wife to the Mecha Drago, he seeks revenge, Duster goes to Osohe to get the egg, comes back with Wess & finds Kumatora, Salsa gets kidnapped by the Pigmasks & Fassad forces him to deliver the boxes, Lucas goes to find Duster in Titiboo, Lucas & party go to the Thunder Tower in disguise, The Needle Hunt, Final confrontation in New Pork) a lot of the finer details and other pieces of polish weren’t present or were changed in the gba version. I think stuff like the timeskip being longer originally is good evidence of this
Has anyone considered asking Itoi directly about a lot of things? I've come up with a bunch of questions I'd ask him if I had the chance. Also, has anyone followed the lead of the potential cartridge at Brownie Brown?
I can tell you, many people have considered asking Itoi directly about a lot of things, it’s just that getting answers for questions about the game is a lot more difficult than it may seem… Also, 1-Up Studios (the company formally known as Brownie Brown) may or may not have a cartridge for it. But at the end of the day, they’re not gonna release or leak an internal Nintendo thing that’s confidential, unfortunately.
@@DaEgg123 I don't think you see what I'm getting at. Itoi is the author of the game's script and a partial owner of the IP. If anyone is able to speak freely without worrying about NDAs, it would be him, right? I could be totally wrong, but there's no harm in trying. Same with the cartridge. I don't think they still have it. Someone took it home just like what happened with Dinosaur Planet. Whoever took it probably knows what happened to it next. If you find out who knows what happened to it, you can find where it is. Can't hurt to try.
@@Bobb11881 That’s exactly the thing though, I’m aware of many people who have attempted to contact Itoi about EB64 through places such as Twitter, and he’s never responded to any queries about it. It certainly doesn’t hurt to try, and I don’t mean to discourage anyone searching for more info about this game (quite the opposite actually) but sadly, it doesn’t seem that Itoi will suddenly begin opening up about this project he worked on over 20 years ago when for years prior to now, he’s hardly ever addressed it ever. As for the cartridge, it certainly would be the ideal situation that someone that wasn’t Nintendo themselves took it from Brownie Brown. Sadly, we can’t be sure on what exactly happened to any physical prototypes. I only hope we can see one resurface soon.
I have my own theory on the whole "English localization quietly cancelled" theory, rather i think Nintendo of America were going to temporarily shelve the English release of Earthbound 64 until a definitive announcement of the game's completion was given to them (though we all know what happened to the game in the end)
I wonder what things would have been like if Mother 3 was released for the N64 and localized as Earthbound 64, even if it was after the Gamecube came out. My sister did have an N64 in its day which has been in my house for as long as I can remember, and there are some N64 games that I have fond memories of when I was very young like Yoshi's Story and Smash Bros. Perhaps "Earthbound 64" could be one of those same games that I played, and I would have nostalgia for it, or more likely just the beginning of it since I had a track record of getting stuck in easy areas in games. On a similar note, has anyone else experienced that feeling where you had this area in a game as a kid you couldn't get past for the life of you, so it just remains unfinished for years and years, until you come back to it when you are older and better at games, and finally get to experience what came after? Finally being able to see what lay beyond that one part is so surreal, like you've just discovered one of those huge mysteries in a classic game, like what was under the ice in Zora's Domain, but on an even larger scale since there's basically a whole game ahead of it.
There are so many betas and unreleased games that really need to get leaked to the public someday. Mother 3 64 and Kirby GCN come to mind first, but I'm probably forgetting many more, important ones.
very great and informative video but i have a suggestion. you should either raise the volume of your dialogue or lower the volume of the music, in some sections like at 12:00 the music is playing just a little too loudly over your speech and its somewhat hard to hear properly. i subscribed tho
Ive never played any mother/ earthbound games, and dont plan on doing so anytime soon, but earthbound 64 is so cool to me. I hope it does get leaked sometime, I absolutely love lost video game media/ beta content.
I actually like both as they both have different feels to their art styles. I like the somewhat more serious art style of 64, but the GBA version works with the more humorous scenes and dialogue better. Overall I like both for different reasons.
I saw on the Cutting Room Floor that apparently, Porky's Spider Mech was in the N64 version. Do we have any evidence of that? I know Porky was in the N64 version, due to the fact that Itoi said that he heavily relied on Porky once.
Yeah, in a 2011 interview with the EB64’s enemy designer, he said “Since Pokey was to appear in the 64 version, too, I designed Pokey, his team, and the place he lived in. The spider mech was in the 64 version, too, but since I haven’t played the GBA version, I’m not sure if the design was the same in the end.” Beyond that, it’d make sense for the Spider Mech to have been in EB64, since it was something established back in Mother 2.
Oh yeah, I remember reading that interview. And the point of it being established in Earthbound, I mean yeah, but the Mother 3 Spider Mech looks vastly different, looking more like a hospital bed/coffin compared to the wrinkly seat on legs in EB. Though, I guess Porky could've tricked Dr. Andonuts to upgrade it, I mean, Porky basically did the same to get the Absolutely Safe Capsule... which kinda feels like the Phantom Zone from Superman now that I think about it.
