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]
Comments (13)
Always a treat to recover lost media, especially from EarthBound.
Can't wait for them to show us these secrets from Earthbound!
Earthbound was cool but I'm getting pretty over news stories about a game that came out 30 years ago and really there is no news. Earthbound articles wore out their welcome a year ago.
Now we just need to discover those long lost Earthbound 64 files!
@dluxxx What are you talking about? This new information regarding its development is the most news this game has seen for a very long time.
I was mildly disappointed that it wasn't the Mother 64 dev cartridge. Those are probably hidden away in Nintendo's archives, never to be used.
@JayJ
The REAL Mother 3.
@ModdedInkling We never know if there might be some sneaky Nintendo fan that might try to uncover that cartridge.
@russell-marlow
They might as well uncover Ura Zelda while they're at it.
Beautiful work
"In the case of Lindblom’s disk ... we were able to forensically recover all of the deleted EarthBound data"
Yeah, using such technical forensic tools like MS-DOS commands UNDELETE and UNFORMAT 😂
That would've been the first thing I'd try with someone else's formatted floppy disk back in the day. And it usually worked as long as you had barely written to the disk afterwards (or preferably hadn't written any files). I found a game or two and other old files. It saved my butt a couple times as well.
@Prizm
It really could be that they used another Tool, but i now what you mean.
At a Workshop some Years ago i was using Dosbox on my Laptop to play some Games, they thought i was an Hacker and Expert because of
cd games
dir
cd Doom
Doom
(or something like that haha)
@Azuris - Yep, it's highly likely they used a dedicated recovery program, which would've been a little more reliable and had a proper GUI, but it's basically doing the same thing underneath.
A few of those programs were around even back then (often running in Windows), but they weren't considered specialist software or anything, they were sold to the general public (and of course, pirated).
I just find it funny when police/companies etc make it sound like they had to use special machines or something, when usually it's just a recovery program. Though there's likely some more hardcore methods out there as well.
cool, while they are at it find out why some of the lower sounds are far too hard to hear on the 3DS.
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