In 1995, Nintendo spent roughly $2 million telling Americans that EarthBound stinks, complete with foul-smelling scratch-and-sniff magazine cards. This episode traces the strange life of the game known in Japan as Mother 2, from copywriter and essayist Shigesato Itoi’s five-year development of a satirical 1990s Americana RPG starring a kid named Ness with a baseball bat, to the rolling health meter that nearly sank the project until HAL Laboratory’s Satoru Iwata rewrote the code from scratch.

We cover the savage anti-piracy trap that deleted save files before the final boss, Marcus Lindblom’s month of 14-hour days localizing the script, Nintendo of America’s censorship mandates, and why the game sold only about 140,000 US copies against half a million in Japan. Then we follow the resurrection: Ness’s 1999 Super Smash Bros. cameo, the Starmen.net community’s petitions and Mother 3 fan translation, and the 2013 Wii U Virtual Console release that topped the digital charts.

• How a traumatizing film Itoi saw by accident as a child shaped the Giygas final battle
• Sound designers pushing a 64-kilobyte chip with micro samples inspired by surf rock, the Beatles, reggae, and dub
• Bars turned into cafes, a Coca-Cola-like logo removed, and pom-poms added to the Happy Happyist hoods
• Why an oversized box with a strategy guide pushed the price to $70 or $80 in 1995
• EarthBound’s DNA in modern indie hits like Undertale and Omori