New secrets about the SNES game EarthBound have been uncovered thanks to efforts of the Video Game History Foundation.

In 2018, former Nintendo of America employee Marcus Lindblom (and the guy responsible for the English-language script in EarthBound) discovered an old floppy disk which were used during EarthBound's localisation process. Unfortunately, he had deleted the EarthBound files long ago, so he passed the disk onto the Video Game History Foundation.

Since then, Rich Whitehouse has been able to forensically recover all of the missing data - which includes the entirety of EarthBound's scripting files.

"In the case of Lindblom’s disk, the only new file he had written after deleting the EarthBound files was a tiny text document, barely a paragraph long. Miraculously, since that new data was so miniscule, we were able to forensically recover all of the deleted EarthBound data, with high confidence that none of the data had been compromised! It appears to be the entirety of EarthBound’s scripting files, in the original scripting language that was likely used by the game’s development team, Ape, in Japan."

So what exactly has been revealed? In short, these never-before-seen files provide glimpses of unused scenes and text, early gameplay ideas that were scrapped, game details that haven't been revealed in the past and even comments from the team members that worked on the game - ranging from writers, developers to translators.

What has been rounded up so far "covers maybe 15%" of the total findings, and reveals some fascinating new details about this cult hit release. You can learn more about all the new discoveries over on the Video Game History Foundation Website or get the rundown in the video above.

Tell us in the comments what you think of these long-lost EarthBound secrets.

[source gamehistory.org]