The scratch and sniff ads in Nintendo power sold me. No fucking clue what the game was about, but I needed it. Got it with the manual the day it released on SNES, I was about 13 and paid for it myself, never looked back.

My friend rented EB in 1996ish, and we played for a bit in his basement, so I was one of the chosen few who knew what a Ness was when he appeared as a hidden character in Smash64. However, I had very little interest at that time. I thought the game was slow and basic. Later in 2000, I tried again on emulator, and once I got to Happy Valley it was freaking impossible. Those diamond-shaped overworld enemies zoomed across the overworld at warp speeds, and there were so many of them. I guess the antipiracy stuff got me, but at that time I didn’t know about it, lol.

So I kind of forgot EB for 15 more years. I was slowly falling out of story-driven games in general. I see this thing on Newgrounds and it looks like it’s from something, but I dunno. A bit later, I learn about Undertale, and decide to give it a whirl. It totally lit my fire again! 10 straight hours getting the True Pacifist stuff, a 29 year old man sent right back to writing cringy fanfics and obsessing about fictional characters again.

Then, I look for more. It obviously was EarthBound-inspired, and there are also a lot of JoJo references. So I start watching the JoJo anime that conveniently started to appear in 2012, and I also remember that there was a big deal made about the re-release of EarthBound on WiiU a few years before, so I get that, and this time it really sticks.

Riveting stuff I know

And thus concludes my first Lemmy post.

I first saw it played it at a friend’s house after a sleepover. Then I downloaded the rom and I was hooked.

In the late 90s I found a copy of it in a used game store for $10. Ripped label but even with that I knew it was a decent deal despite not knowing much about the game.

Later that year I ended up being grounded to my room for some reason for a fair amount of time and I spent all that time playing Earthbound. Kept me going, and it turned into my favorite game of all time.