Earthbound creator addresses fans, official EarthBound page launches

Shigesato Itoi, the creator of Super Nintendo RPG known as EarthBound, has addressed gamers on Nintendo's official website about the release of the original game on Wii U's virtual console recently.

The person who passed away has to be in all sorts of different people's memories.
What they've done, how stupid they were, what kind of things they did for fun,
and how kind that person was sometimes.
All the people who are still alive are laughing,
wanting to be the first one to bring up those things to everyone around them.
The life I want to live is something that can be concluded with that kind of a party-like wake.
Fame and fortune, setting records and accomplishments are all meaningless.
That person is inside those stories that are told,
where people talk about their episodes, casually and sincerely.

Well, it's not dead, and it's not even human,
but to me Earthbound is a game that's kind of like that guy.

Now that you'll be able to play Earthbound to your heart's content,
I hope you'll play it with someone and create all kinds of great, happy memories.
I'm glad that this day has come.
And I think everyone who had a part in making this game is very excited too.

In addition to Ioti's messgage, Nintendo has created an EarthBound page for its Miiverse social network on Wii U, described as "your official source for the latest EarthBound news and information."

Nintendo announced in April that it would release EarthBound on Virtual Console for Wii U. The company followed up the promise when it released the Nintendo RPG cult-classic earlier this month. The original title was produced by current Nintendo chief Satoru Iwata.

Marcus Lindblom, the who headed the game's localization, said in an interview that the biggest challenge bringing the game to the west was "how to handle the cultural references."

"The thing that's really weird about Earthbound is that I was trying to translate someone's view of what the U.S. is like from the outside, someone who, obviously, isn't American," said Lindblom. "I had to take an outsider's view of the U.S. and turn it into something everybody here would play and understand. That was one of the more difficult things to do."