by Update []: We have some exciting news for Mother/Earthbound fans! After "nineteen-ish years of development", Earthbound Beginnings Remake is finally available to download (as spotted by GBA Temp).
Earthbound Beginnings, in case you are in need of a quick refresher (and don't feel like scrolling below), is essentially a ROM hack of the SNES title EarthBound, which recreates the 8-bit title Mother / EarthBound Beginnings in the style of its 16-Bit sequel.
The current version of the hack, led by the ROM hacker Gabbls, has been in development since 2021, but it actually has links to two different projects - one of which dates back to 2012, and another that goes back even further, all the way to 2007.
If you want to grab the patch and play it yourself, you can either use the built-in ROM patcher on the Earthbound Beginnings Remake website to patch your legally acquired copy of EarthBound, or download the hack yourself and patch it elsewhere using your own preferred method.
To mark the release, the artist BigSharkZ has mocked up SNES-style box art for the game, and a full-colour strategy guide is also in the works and will be available soon for download from the site. The team has also released a separate patch called EarthBound: Giygas Strikes Back, which it describes as "a patch for the vanilla game that brings in the quality of life features we added to the remake!"
Here's some footage of the patch in action:
Original Story []: After roughly 18 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 in 2007 as 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 patch progressed for roughly 7 years, with a lot of work done on it (mostly behind closed doors), but then, in 2019, it stalled after H.S. effectively vanished, leaving the project's future in limbo.
As a result, a group of individuals, including the Starmen.Net user Livvy94, went to great lengths to save and preserve the scraps of the unfinished project, before another individual, 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 debuted at the Mother Direct in 2024, with progress at the time reportedly "steady". Since then, however, an even newer trailer has now been released, suggesting the ambitious ROM Hack is now almost finished and will be released next year, in 2026.