It may have confused some of you to see a select number of gamers fall into paralytic fits of glee over an ESRB rating for Earthbound on the Virtual Console, marking the quirky SNES RPG's first appearance in North America after almost 13 years.

Those uninitiated to the game might've wondered what the fuss was all about. "Balderdash," you exclaimed to nobody in particular. "What's the big deal about an ESRB rating? Who cares if it comes out on the Virtual Console?"

And you'd be right to say so. At face value, EarthBound's appearance on the Virtual Console might seem an insignificant feat. But for the community that has fought tooth and nail for the series in an unwelcoming territory, the rating is a nod from Nintendo that's been anticipated for a full decade, and is just about the best news these gamers have had in just as long.

A History Lesson
Unconventional from the start, what was released in North America as EarthBound was actually the second in a Japanese series called Mother, characterized by its modern Western settings, outlandish characters and enemies, and an utterly bizarre sense of humor. The first title, which hit the Famicom in 1989, came ridiculously close to a North American release, with a translation in the can and packaging and advertising readied for a late 1991 release on the NES. But with the SNES having hit store shelves just a few months before, Nintendo deemed Mother's North American debut--then-titled Earth Bound--too risky, and the project was shelved.

The company gave it another shot with the release of Mother 2 in 1994, which arrived in North America just short of a year later. Retitled EarthBound, the game introduced the overseas audience to prophetic bees, zombie prostitutes, enraged hippies and menacing piles of sentient vomit. A fun and scathing satire of Western culture, EarthBound quickly became a fan favorite.

Sadly, the game tanked in North America, selling roughly 140,000 copies compared to about twice that figure in Japan. In embracing the game's unconventional sense of humor, Nintendo of America marketed the game in a similarly unusual manner, printing awful scented scratch-'n-sniff ads that proclaimed "this game stinks." The ill-advised marketing push--part of Nintendo's somewhat laughable "Play It Loud" campaign--coupled with EarthBound's $70 price point lead many gamers to look elsewhere for their role-playing fix.

A third and final game, Mother 3, was announced in 1996 for the Nintendo 64, where it was mired in development hell until its cancellation in 2000. Three years later in an advertisement for a Mother 1 and 2 compilation on the Game Boy Advance, series creator Shigesato Itoi announced plans to bring Mother 3 to the portable system, returning the series to its 2D roots and maintaining a scenario similar to what had been planned for the Nintendo 64. The game finally saw release in April of 2006, leading the burgeoning EarthBound fan community to clamor for a North American localization.

Nintendo of America, meanwhile, seemed content to pretend that the game had never existed to begin with.

What do we want / When do we want it
Back in 1997, Reid Young created one of the internet's first EarthBound fan sites, and joined with Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin to create Starmen.Net two years later. The site has since become the one-stop destination for the EarthBound fan community for almost a decade. Named for EarthBound's most iconic villain, the Starman, the site has served as a repository for an absolutely massive stock of fan-created media, information on the Mother series and, perhaps most notably, a means of rallying the fan community to the cause of seeing more of the games in North America.

Starmen's lengthy history of fan activism began the year of its inception, when the site organized a petition to see the original Mother released on the Game Boy Color. To that end, the site amassed 1850 real signatures of supportive gamers, bound them neatly in a customized book, and sent them off to Nintendo of America. A representative of the company replied to Young, saying that the package was "forwarded to the appropriate department for review," which became Nintendo's last word on the subject.

Or was it? Turn the page for more.