This is not a drill.
Shigesato Itoi appeared before the Nintendo World Championships to announce that Mother 1 would come to the Virtual Console as Earthbound Beginnings at 9pm ET / 6pm PT.
Released twenty years after Earthbound on SNES, the game was originally released in 1989 in Japan and was translated for release in North America but was never released before outside of Japan.
You can see the trailer below:
UPDATE
The game is now live, and priced at $6.99.
It's nice to see this finally getting released. I was hoping Nintendo would call it "Spacebound" and Mother 3 "Timebound" though "Before Earthbound" and "After Earthbound" would have worked too.Now they can bring Mother 3 over as Earthbound Endings and silence the clamor for Mother 4 once and for all. Oh who am I kidding, silence it for most of the clamorers.
I wonder who in Nintendo made the call to do this. You figure a big corporate suit would feel that an old NES game doesn't matter. This won't make a noticeable improvement in Wii U sales and won't sell millions of copies so who cares, right? But it earns goodwill with fans and just makes the Wii U that much better of a product. Whoever decided to do this knows that and also knows enough about Earthbound to know that for some of us this is a huge deal.
