Brooklyn Nine-Nine actor and America's Got Talent host, Terry Crews, started trending on social media after he took everyone by surprise by suddenly tweeting out a request for the Nintendo video game, Mother 3, to be localized.
"Localized" is the term for when a Japanese video game is adapted into English for the United States market. This doesn't just mean translating the game from Japanese into English, but will often also mean adapting the references and jokes for an American audience. Despite being released in 2006, Mother 3 has never been localized.
The history of the Mother role playing video game is a strange one. Mother was released in Japan in 1989. It was modeled on the role playing game aspect of Dragon's Quest, but with a unique approach, including a late-20th Century American setting. There were plans for Mother to be localized for the U.S. market, but they were scrapped (at the time) while well into development. Instead, the first American localized version of the Mother games occurred in 1995 when the 1994 sequel, Mother 2, was localized as EarthBound in the United States. The game did not initially sell very well, but in retrospect, it has become one of the most acclaimed Nintendo video games of all-time.
Mother 3 was then produced in 2006 in Japan for the Game Boy Advance but has not yet been localized in the United States, only unofficial fan translations exist. Amusingly, the original Mother was eventually localized for the WII as EarthBound Beginnings. The other strange thing is that Ness, the hero of Earthbound, and Lucas, the hero of Mother 3, have both appeared as characters in the Super Smash Bros. series of video games!
Again, video game fans have been asking for this game for years, so when Crews tweeted about it out of nowhere, fans all latched on to the message and hoped that it would put pressure on Nintendo to finally release the localized version of the game, even if many fans have long since given up hope of it ever happening.
Still, fans appreciated Crews' attempt enough to get his name trending on social media today.
If anything, perhaps this new attention will get Nintendo to make EarthBound and EarthBound Beginnings, available as part of the Nintendo Switch Online NES and SNES libraries.
Source: Twitter
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