Tonda Gossa! This is Kody NOKOLO back with another Mother Forever Almost Monthly News for November! This might be the biggest news month all year! Watch it in video form or read it below.

First, it’s that time again, Mother Direct submissions are now open until the beginning of January! Send in your fan project, ROM hack, or Motherlike indie game applications to be a part of it whwn it airs next July. I hope I can bring you all a Direct that can celebrate 35 years of MOTHER. These Directs over the past few years have been tons of fun! I love meeting the artists behind each of the projects every year, and I’m sure it’ll be fun to put this year’s together. For anyone that isn’t interested in Mother Direct, but has an indie RPG on Steam, applications are also open to ALL indie RPGs for our Steam event called RPG Direct 2024!

Any Direct themed merchandise from this year is still available too, and all profits support Child’s Play Charity!

Next, have you seen the EarthBound, USA documentary yet?! It tells the story of the fandom from its beginnings on Starmen.net, and it gives new insight into so many events that took place throughout that time with interviews from members of the community, interviews from Nintendo employees who listened to Starmen from the inside, and an interview from Itoi himself! Itoi even gives some new insight into ideas he’s never really spoken about before when it comes to questions from the community. It’s totally worth a watch so you can hear the story of what our community was like at a time when the internet was so new, and outside of just EarthBound, it really memorializes that time when communities were like that for tons of games!

A couple interviews have been done with members of the movie’s team too. Director Jazzy Benson was interviewed on “MOTHER,” She Wrote and Archival Producer Aaron Cargile was interviewed by Thane Gaming! Listen to those once you watch the movie to get some insight into how it was made. Thane took the time to transcribe his interview for our website’s interview section (and of course, all interviews on “MOTHER,” She Wrote are transcribed on their own site).

Unrelated to the movie, another cool interview happened recently with the creator of the MOTHER Paper Theatre Production, a feature-length reenactment of the first MOTHER in paper form! If you’ve never heard of that, watch it and listen to the interview with the creator by Remie REM Sleep!

Chokan and the 84 Cafe

I went to Japan again in November, and this time I visited a cafe that’s run by Toru Hashimoto, also known as Chokan! This is the 84 Cafe, named after the “hashi” in Hashimoto which means 84! Chokan was the first MOTHER developer I met on this trip! He was a QA tester on the original MOTHER 2 who worked directly with Nintendo to test games during development back then. He had tons of stuff from MOTHER 2 and even MOTHER 3 N64’s development showcased at the cafe, including lots of other signatures from developers who have been there in the past, like members of Game Freak and Yuji Horii of Dragon Quest!

My fiance and I are making our own game called GNOMONIC, so we left a fun drawing based on it there for him in his autograph book since we talked to him about it, and I also mentioned how I research the MOTHER games. The handwritten note from Itoi and the DCMC shirts were some of my favorite things there, but they even had Starmen.net’s old EarthBound Anthology there, and I loved that! This was my first time looking through it in person! I love official stuff, but having something historical from the fans was so surprising. I just saw that book in EarthBound, USA, and it was awesome to see it again out of nowhere! If you’re interested in visiting the cafe yourself, you can book a tour!

I came to the cafe again the next day to meet my friend Robert Sephazon, a game producer in Japan who used to work with me to translate Masahiro Sakurai’s Famitsu columns when Sakurai used to write them. Chokan was busy making food for everyone while I was there, but my friend was able to pass one of my Mother Forever pins to Chokan as a gift eventually, which he displays in the cafe now! It’s like Mother Forever is a part of the history books now…
(Side note, if you still want to get one of those to support website hosting costs, find them from JobJob!)

After that, we stayed at the Marufukuro Hotel in Kyoto, Nintendo’s former HQ that was used from 1933-1959, during their time making playing cards and just before its famous toys and video games. I stayed in the room formerly used by the Yamauchi family, which held tons of detail in its woodwork and molds.

Early Nintendo history can be found throughout the building too. Its library is also full of history, and this is where MOTHER comes in! Books from Hobonichi including the complete MOTHER scripts and the Iwata-san book are both on display here.

A MOTHER 3 Developer Is Working on GNOMONIC!

After coming back to Tokyo, I met up with a MOTHER 3 developer who I’ll keep secret for a little longer. Maybe you might be able to guess who it is? I asked him about his career and about whether he could work on my game GNOMONIC! In the Direct and my last news update, I thought our demo would be ready by the end of the year, but it’s looking like it will be ready in the first quarter of 2024, sometime between January and March, so please wait just a little longer to play it!

A Kickstarter will follow in the spring where I’ll introduce that mystery guest developer. I’ll also share what he told me about his career in my interview with him I’ll post on this channel. I’ve done a lot of interviews with fans, but this will be the first time I’ll share an interview with a MOTHER developer. This will be the first interview with this person available, and he’s had a hand in so many games that have personally effected me, not just MOTHER 3. I’m really grateful for his kindness and for his excitement to contribute to my game. I hope you’ll support GNOMONIC and that developer’s future work on it when the time comes!!

That’s all for my trip to Japan this year. Speaking of delays, I also wanted to pass on an update from the developer of EarthBound Dimensions! Like my game, this was another project aiming for release by the end of this year, but I can confirm that it will be aiming for the first half of 2023 now. Hope you’ll look forward to that!

By the way, for all the indie RPG fans out there, I’ll be starting a playthrough of a new indie RPG called Knuckle Sandwich on Twitch soon! And soon, I’ll also be playing a really cool looking fan remake of the first Dragon Quest made by NightFly in RPG Maker! Follow me on Twitch to watch it if you’re interested in either of those and more RPG stuff!

Porky Merchandise from Hobonichi

For our Hobonichi update this month, a New Pork City themed store was announced for December, just in time for the new year like in MOTHER 3! And Porky themed merchandise was announced alongside it like a the Friend’s Yo-yo and a new plush pack that comes with Porky and Mr. Saturn has also been announced! And on top of that, a collection featuring the Minch family was also shared this week. The new stuff will be available on the Hobonichi MOTHER store on December 14th at 9PM ET.