The Copywriter,
the Cosmic Horror,
and EarthBound

A game about suburban American childhood written by a man who had never made a game, nearly cancelled five times, marketed with scratch-and-sniff ads that made mailboxes smell of flatulence. It sold 140,000 copies. Then everything changed.

Shigesato Itoi was not a game designer. He was Japan's most celebrated advertising copywriter — the man responsible for some of the most famous taglines in Japanese commercial history, a television personality, an essayist, a fishing enthusiast. In 1987, a colleague introduced him to Dragon Quest on his Famicom. While playing it, Itoi conceived of a role-playing game set not in a medieval fantasy world — he had no knowledge of those — but in the suburban present. Kids. Psychic powers. Shopping malls. A world recognisable as the one outside the window, made strange.

He pitched the idea to Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto rejected it initially, citing the commercial failure of other celebrity-produced Famicom games. Nintendo's president Hiroshi Yamauchi overruled him, having developed a personal admiration for Itoi. Development began. It would take five years, expand from an 8-megabit cartridge to a 24-megabit one, and come under repeated threats of cancellation — until a young programmer named Satoru Iwata joined the team and, in a matter of months, rewrote the entire engine from scratch. Itoi has said that the project would not exist without Iwata. Satoru Iwata would later become Nintendo's president.

"Normally, game characters are treated as though they're just parodies of people. In EarthBound, the characters are handled so well, and it made a great impression on me." — Shigeru Miyamoto

The game Itoi made from all of this is unlike anything in the canon. You play as Ness, a boy in a baseball cap, woken by a meteorite crash outside his house. Your enemies are street signs, taxi cabs, piles of vomit, and walking nooses. Your money accumulates in a bank account and must be withdrawn from an ATM. Your father exists only as a voice on the telephone. The Mr. Saturn characters — small, round creatures with large noses and absurdist dialogue — speak in a font based on the handwriting of Itoi's daughter. The soundtrack samples the French national anthem, the Monty Python theme, and The Beach Boys. The final boss is a cosmic horror called Giygas whose dialogue and visual design were drawn from a traumatic experience Itoi had as a child, when he accidentally viewed a violent film and was so disturbed that his parents began to worry about his wellbeing.

The American release in 1995 was a masterclass in marketing failure. Nintendo spent $2 million on a campaign built around the tagline "This Game Stinks" — full-page magazine ads with scratch-and-sniff inserts that smelled of farts and stale pizza. The problem was that the smell didn't stay contained. If the tab was jostled before the magazine arrived, the entire issue turned rancid. Nintendo Power readers reported that their mailboxes had been infected. The game sold 140,000 copies in North America. It was declared a failure and never received an official European release.

What followed was one of gaming's great reversals. A dedicated online community at Starmen.net kept the flame alive through the late 1990s. When Ness appeared in Super Smash Bros. in 1999, millions of players encountered the character without knowing his game. The music sampling issues that had kept EarthBound off Virtual Console for years were eventually resolved, and the game arrived on Nintendo Switch Online in 2022 — available legally and cheaply for the first time to a European audience that had waited twenty-seven years. It consistently tops polls as one of the most emotionally affecting games ever made. Undertale, Omori, and South Park: The Stick of Truth all cite it directly. It was listed in 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. As it happens, so has this series.