After over 10 years of development, a remake of Mother / EarthBound Beginnings built inside the cult classic SNES title EarthBound is finally "nearing completion", according to a new trailer published during last weekend's Free Fangame Festival (F3).
Earthbound Beginnings Remake originally started life back in 2007 under the name EarthBound Zero, and is a ROM hack designed to recreate the 1989 title Mother / Earthbound Beginnings in the style of its 16-bit sequel.
It was originally being developed by Clyde Mandelin (Tomato), one of the founders of the Mother fan website Starmen.Net (who was also among those responsible for the unofficial translation of Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance), but was later picked up by members of the Starmen.Net forums over 10 years ago, back in 2012, with this new version of the project being led by a user on the site called "H.S".
This version of the game ended up progressing for roughly 7 years, with a bunch of work being done on the project (mostly behind closed doors), but then, in 2019, it ended up stalling, after H.S. effectively vanished, leaving the future of the project in limbo. As a result, a group of individuals, including the Starmen.Net user Livvy94, ended up going to great lengths to save and preserve the scraps of the unfinished project to upload to Github, before another individual named Gabbls decided to take up the mantle and work on their own offshoot of the project in 2021.
The first full trailer for this iteration of the project was debuted the Mother Direct in 2024, with the progress at the time reportedly being "steady". Since then, however, an even newer trailer has been released, suggesting the ambitious ROM Hack is now almost finished and will be released next year, in 2026.