To start off, where did the idea for the MOTHER 3 Tribute project first come from, and what was the initial goal?

Well to start, a lot of us are big MOTHER fans (probably obvious), and so as far back as 2016, when our channel was still Smashified, we wanted to express our appreciation for the franchise in some significant way, so we dedicated the month of May 2016 to making some MOTHER characters as Trophies. That’s when we first got our feet wet with making 3D MOTHER assets, and we would talk in passing about how cool it would be if an entire MOTHER game were remade in 3D. It wasn’t until 2019 after attending Lightbox Expo in LA that we seriously considered actually doing something like that. Right from the start, we knew we only wanted to create a mock trailer of MOTHER 3 in 3D, and not the whole game.

The initial plan was to release the trailer on April 20, 2021 to commemorate the game’s 15th anniversary, but the project was too ambitious, so we were forced to take longer.

That’s totally understandable. After all, one of the things I was most impressed by was the sheer amount of people working on the project! With many familiar faces from other MOTHER inspired creations, like Pik, who’s brother Prism works for the Oddity team. What was it like forming together this “dream team”, and did your differing schedules and other project commitments make progress and communication a difficulty at all?

Finding people was definitely critical. One of Chris’s strengths is finding artists from all over the art community, so a good number of artists on the team weren’t actually all that familiar with the MOTHER series, but had strengths that aligned with our vision for the project. But of course, we also knew of specific people in the art community who had done works about MOTHER in the past, so we approached as many of them as possible.

Pik is someone we’d known for a while before the project actually, with our paths having crossed during the Smashified days. After he was on board, Harry caught our attention with his 3D work on Ocarina of time characters for his remake project. We actually only learned that he was Pik’s brother after sharing his work with the team, and at that point we knew we needed to bring him on board.

The team steadily grew over the course of the project as various needs arised.

It’s awesome to see such a string of connections bring such talented people together, and even introduce the series to people along the way! Upon seeing the video, I noticed a lot of comments on how organically MOTHER 3 seems to translate into “3D.” Of course, many are aware the game was originally conceived as a 3D action RPG on the N64. When it came to figuring out how certain elements might translate into 3D, did the team refer to any N64 material at all? What sort of steps were taken into envisioning MOTHER in a new dimension?

Well first and foremost, we knew we wanted to capture the aesthetic of the ubiquitous clay figures that were produced for the first two games in the series. Given that the third game never got the same treatment in an official capacity, we felt strongly that we wanted to try to create an interpretation of the sprites that lived up to that legacy.

We chose to stick closely to the GBA designs of the characters, but we did refer to the N64 designs of the characters as well as old concept art in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of the characterizations of the cast. For instance, we knew that despite Kumatora being often labeled as a Tomboy, we felt that the version of the character from the canceled 64 game didn’t shy away completely from having some feminine characteristics, so that informed how we approached not only her visual design, but also how she’s animated. I see her as a tough character who’s not insecure about being perceived as soft.

We also did look at a lot of fan interpretations of the characters, including the clay models by Ruy Fernando (FlintOfMother3) and Camille Young, which I think are sort of the defacto standards that the community would fall back on without any official clay models to use. Although we knew we didn’t want to adopt any of these designs directly, we thought it was beneficial to understand why those artists interpreted things the way they did and let that inform our interpretations.

But at the end of the day, sticking to the sprites was most important. To that end, we would often look at EarthBound’s sprites in order to see how elements of the clay models were distilled into their respective sprites, and we would try to reverse engineer that process in order to inject elements of EarthBound’s models into our interpretations of the MOTHER 3 sprites where it felt appropriate.

Having updated 3D interpretations from Smash Ultimate must’ve really helped too – I know in terms of your own original Kumatora render from the “Smashified” days versus now, there’s definitely a lot of influence from how HAL brought those designs to life in that game. Although, now that you speak about it, I also do see how your own interpretation even back then incorporated more “feminine” aspects that call back to original N64 appearance! It’s a nice to have so many different references to create a “definitive” design that best represents different aspects of the characters.

One of the smaller details that really brought a sense of authenticity to the videos this far has honestly been the UI. It feels exactly like something you’d seen from a modern Creatures Inc. game (formerly APE, co-developers of MOTHER 1, 2, and 3 N64.) Was creating something that felt authentic to a Nintendo produced product an important aspect to the project?

Creating UI that feels authentic was definitely a focus of mine, personally, as my formal training is as a graphic designer. I consider myself a bit of a stickler when it comes to user interfaces feeling real, and so even though you don’t see a lot of it represented in the trailer, I went through the trouble of mapping out things that aren’t even in the trailer, such as characters selecting actions in battle. I took great care to get every detail feeling consistent down to the frame as if there’s a programmed system behind it all.

Being a graphic designer, I also used this as an opportunity to put my typeface design experience to good use, so all of the fonts you see in the trailer are custom designed based on the various instances of pixelated text from the original game.

It’s interesting that you compare the UI to a that of a game by Creatures, because I don’t think I ever even looked at any recent games of theirs as a reference!

Most of the UI design choices were motivated by trying to take UI elements from the original game and give them a modern facelift, so to speak.

For sure. Your attention to detail definitely paid of, as I’ve seen lot of people convinced it’s a functional, playable build and not simply the work of great animation and editing!

Among all the positive comments, one concern I’ve seen many bring up is the possibility of a potential DMCA from Nintendo. Although the MOTHER series doesn’t have a history of takedowns due to Itoi having joint ownership of the series, the recent situation with GilvaSunner has made a lot of people worried for the future. Is this something your team is at all concerned about, or do you feel secure in your position of this being a non-profit, original fan project?

Well I can’t speak to how accurate this is, but it does seem like companies like Nintendo tend to only go after projects that offer people a playable alternative to one of their own products, so we knew from the start that we didn’t want to make something that people would be able to download and play. I can’t say for sure that doing so puts us in the clear, but we can always take comfort that you can never really get rid of anything once it’s on the internet. Especially something as simple as a video.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I personally feel the tribute project is safe from any retaliation from Nintendo and Itoi especially, but since enough people were worried about the topic I’d figure to ask your own thoughts on the matter. Hopefully your answer will perhaps clear some of those worries!

So far we’ve had two videos from Curiomatic – without perhaps spoiling any surprises, should MOTHER fans keep a close eye on the channel and MOTHER 3 Tribute website for any future updates?

We definitely have plans to give people a look behind the curtain with some behind-the-scenes content about the project, so people can look forward to that at the very least! We don’t really have any concrete plans in regards to what more we’ll be creating for the project, but we do have a mountain of assets at our disposal now, so it’s possible we’ll make some much smaller pieces of content here and there in the future. No promises though!

Whatever is released (be it MOTHER related or not), I’m sure we’ll all be looking forward to it! To end things off, is there anything you’d like for the MOTHER community to know following the release of the trailer? And where can they go if they’d like to support more of your content?

I’d first like to say that we’re so very grateful for the positive reception by the MOTHER community. It’s been very fulfilling for everyone on the team to see so many wholesome comments and genuine reactions, and it’s definitely been a milestone that we’ll remember for many years to come.

As for supporting our content, we do have a patreon page where people can get early previews of things that we’re working on. Other than that, we just appreciate when people share our content with others or follow us on Twitter or YouTube.