Mother was the sixth best-selling game of 1989 in Japan, where it sold about 400,000 copies and received a 'Silver Hall of Fame' score from Famitsu magazine. The game was eventually released globally as EarthBound Beginnings for the Wii U Virtual Console in June 2015 and Nintendo Switch Online in February 2022.

A copy of this prototype was later found and circulated on the Internet under the informal title EarthBound Zero. A North American version of the game was localized into English, but was abandoned as commercially nonviable. Though Miyamoto rejected the proposal at first, he eventually gave Itoi a development team. Writer and director Shigesato Itoi pitched Mother's concept to Shigeru Miyamoto while visiting Nintendo's headquarters for other business. The game uses random encounters to enter a menu-based, first-person perspective battle system. Mother follows the young Ninten as he uses his great-grandfather's studies on psychic powers to fight hostile, formerly inanimate objects and other enemies. It is modeled on the gameplay of the Dragon Quest series, but is set in the late 20th-century United States, unlike its fantasy genre contemporaries.

It is the first entry in the Mother series. Mother, officially known outside of Japan as EarthBound Beginnings, is an RPG developed by Ape and Pax Softnica and published by Nintendo for the Famicom in 1989.

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