
The emotionally powerful Mother 3 was famously denied North American release as well. Though the Super NES release was not a big hit (140,000 copies sold according to Wikipedia), Nintendo of America could have given the franchise a new life-and realized gamers' hopes and dreams in the process-during the Game Boy Advance era with the release of Mother 1 & 2, but it didn't happen.

Of course, the drama doesn't only involve the Virtual Console version of EarthBound.

I’m pretty sure that even when I asked for, say, the most-wanted Genesis game, EarthBound still actually got the highest number of votes, although I had to disqualify it for not being a Genesis game. Support was so unwavering that I quickly had to modify the poll on a monthly basis to focus on different game systems or different genres, lest we be stuck with the same results issue after issue. For a time we polled readers on their most-wanted Virtual Console games, and EarthBound was constantly the most-wanted title, with the original Mother not far behind. You don’t have to look too far to see bustling communities at sites like EarthBound Central or, and when I was an editor at Nintendo Power, it was impossible to miss the constant outpouring of fan support. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the financial incentive isn’t there.
