EarthBound 64


 * This page is about the canceled Nintendo 64 title. For the Game Boy Advance game of the same title, see Mother 3.

EarthBound 64 (Japanese: ＭＯＴＨＥＲ３：豚王の秋 Mother 3: Fall of the Pig King) was intended as the third game in the Mother series, with a projected release on the Nintendo 64DD in 1999. The project's development switched to a normal Nintendo 64 cartridge when the Nintendo 64DD proved to be unsuccessful, but due to the inexperience of the development team with three-dimensional games, the game was ultimately canceled before being brought back into development for the Game Boy Advance in 2003.

During development, the game was stated to have 12 playable characters across 12 chapters, with the revealed characters including all of the party members that were in the final game, as well as a character that may have been, or simply resembled, Ness from the previous game, and two unknown characters. The subtitle used in the Japanese game was changed several times during development, with one being "Forest of the Chimera" (森のキマイラ), but the most common one being "Fall of the Pig King".

Story
Though the storyline of the game is for the most part the same as the Game Boy Advance release, several things were changed from the planned Nintendo 64 game. For one, EarthBound 64 was intended to be placed some ten years after EarthBound, in 200X, rather than the unstated amount of time the final game occurs after its prequel. The length of the game's story, in time, also was altered, with EarthBound 64 having 12 chapters spread over the course of ten years, unlike the final game, which only has eight chapters spread over the course of three years. A "main" character had not been chosen during the Nintendo 64 development, though it was likely that Lucas would have eventually come to be in this role, as in the final game. One of the chapters was stated to feature the disappearance of a character's 40-year-old father.

Development
EarthBound 64 was planned not long after EarthBound itself was nearing release, with an in-game reference to the development team planning Mother 3 in Japan, localized as them planning EarthBound 2 in the English release. The initial planning stages were for a Super NES release, though with the system quickly on its way to being replaced by the Nintendo 64, development shifted to the Nintendo 64DD instead. When the addon proved a failure, the game was changed to a cartridge release, with a planned use of the same size cartridge which contained The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and utilization of the Rumble Pak addon for the Nintendo 64 controller. Due to the difficulty of development, with the 3D aspect of the game being far more complex than the 2D sprite-based past games, the team, including Shigesato Itoi, were discouraged from making a fourth game in the Mother series.

A trailer and playable demo were featured at Nintendo Space World 1999, with a projected release date of March 22, 2000. However, on August 21, 1999, Shigesato Itoi announced that EarthBound 64 was canceled. Some time after the cancellation, Itoi uploaded screenshots and music from the game to his website, with some featuring areas from EarthBound, among them a destroyed Onett and wrecked Monotoli Building.

Trivia

 * The billboard in the screenshot of Onett highly resembles the one used in the Onett stage in Super Smash Bros. Melee.