Mother 3
Image: Nintendo

It's pretty well known at this point that Toby Fox's Undertale took quite a bit of inspiration from the Mother / Earthbound series. Heck, you only need to play Undertale for 5 minutes to see the similarities! Fox's love for the Mother games goes all the way back to his high school days, during which he created ROM hacks such as Earthbound: The Halloween Hack.

Given his adoration of the Mother series, Fox naturally had aspirations of contributing to a potential new game, and even toyed with the idea of asking its creator, Shigesato Itoi, about whether or not he wanted to see a new game come to fruition. Ultimately, after hearing what Ito had to say on the success of Undertale, Fox chose not to bring the subject up.

Courtesy of YouTube channel Mother Forever, here's what Fox had to say on the matter:

"I actually wanted to see if [Ito] had any interest in seeing another game in the Mother series, even if someone made it without him. Because if so, I'd gladly give it my all to help out in any way that I could. However, he seemed really happy with the success of Mother-inspired games like Undertale and told me something like, "hey, you should make Undertale 2!". So in the end I never asked about that, and personally, meeting him made me realise that no one else could make Mother 4 anyway."

You can check out in the full video below. In our opinion, we reckon the Mother series is pretty much done now. Despite Nintendo recently launching the first two games on the Nintendo Switch Online service, we've yet to see an official western release of Mother 3 (16 years later, mind!). The odds of Mother 4 getting developed anytime soon seem slim, at best. While it would be fantastic to see the likes of Toby Fox work on such a project, we think he made the right call here.

What do you think of a potential Mother 4 game made by Toby Fox? Share your thoughts in the usual place!

[source youtube.com, via gonintendo.com]