So Aaron, before we dive deep into this, I just wanted to ask: are you from Tucson, and what do you think about the whole connection with the town of Twoson from EarthBound?

Well, here’s what’s funny: I grew up in Phoenix, so I’ve lived in Arizona for most of my life. As a kid, I really wanted to get into film. I did theater and stuff in high school, so I came down to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona film school. At that time, I knew EarthBound was a video game, but it really wasn’t until I got brought onto the project that I made the Tucson/Twoson connection. I think in his Legends of Localization book, Clyde Mandelin referred to it being–and I’m misquoting him–something like “cosmic irony” that of course, Tucson became the city where all the MOTHER fans of that generation sort of congregated. I think you can relate to this: growing up, there’s not a whole lot of media that’s about Arizona that isn’t westerns. And so kind of getting to see a tip of the hat to Tucson in the game is pretty cool.

For sure. That is one of my favorite books ever, I love Clyde’s work. I’ve reread it a ton of times! Whenever I’m in the mood and tempted to replay EarthBound, I think about the time investment, so I’ll usually just pick up that book instead and flip through…it takes you through the game chronologically, which satisfies what I’m looking for.

Yeah, all of his Legends of Localization books are amazing. They’re like what you’d expect to see in a college syllabus or something because of how in depth and well done they are.

It’s also nice to poke around on the website. Clyde/Mato doesn’t update it too often, but when he does, it’s a treat. I wanted to know though, do you play a lot of video games in general? And if not, what are your other hobbies?

I would say that I am the definition of a casual gamer. I enjoy video games, I play them from time to time, but I’ve never really been a huge gamer. I’m much more of a film person. I’m very into history…that sort of thing. What’s interesting is that as a kid, I played a lot of video games (as I think most people do), and growing up, I watched a lot of retro gaming YouTube of the mid to late aughts. “The Angry Video Game Nerd”, and stuff like that. So coming to this job and getting to work on this film was really an opportunity for me to dive back into that world. I would say for video games, I’m a big fan of point and click adventure games. I either like games that have really good linear stories, or are very open world, sandbox exploration types. I kind of go between the two.

I mean, the writing is what drew me into EarthBound in the first place–have you played all of the MOTHER games? Do you have a favorite one?

I got brought onto this project in mid 2020, which means I was on the last third of EarthBound, USA’s total production cycle. Basically, the last really big push that started a few years ago. And so when I got brought on, I had heard of EarthBound. I think I’d watched a couple of videos about the game, but I was so ignorant about it that I thought Ness in “Super Smash Bros.” was a reference to Nintendo Power’s “Howard & Nester” or something like that. I didn’t really make the connection! I saw Ness, and I’m like: “Yeah the NES, right? There’s R.O.B., everyone is here!” But when I got the job, I went ahead and read more about the games. I wasn’t really big on finishing games, but I knew I had to play enough to be able to get a grasp of it”. As a producer, I’m not the director of the film. Jazzy Benson’s got encyclopedic knowledge of EarthBound, as do many other people who work at Fangamer. But for me, I figured that I needed to know enough about this to ‘get it’, so that I could make the right decisions when working on the film. I have played a fair amount of MOTHER 2 and MOTHER 3, then. I hate to admit it, but I have not, unfortunately, beaten either game, and I have yet to play MOTHER 1. Of the ones that I have played, I definitely think (and again, you know, I’m saying this as somebody who hasn’t finished either game yet), I was really struck with how different MOTHER 3 is. As a film person, I thought that playing the game is like experiencing a really well-crafted movie in the way that its story unfolds. I definitely was very, very impressed by the writing. And I think as we learn more about Shigesato Itoi and the history behind the games, we get to see all of these kinds of autobiographical things he’s putting into it, or these real world influences that he’s infused into his creation. And to kind of build off of that, one thing I did do as well was try my hand at some of the other RPGs from the same time period as EarthBound, just to try to get enough of a grasp on what was out then. I played through most of Chrono Trigger and a couple of other games too, but I would definitely say that from a writing perspective, EarthBound was heads and shoulders the most sophisticated one.

It’s funny that you mention how different MOTHER 3 is from EarthBound…I remember Itoi mentioned in an interview Chewy translated that he had wanted to move away from the “road movie” that most every RPG was at the time (like EarthBound), in that you move from one town to the next without really looking back. MOTHER 3, on the other hand, has a smaller pool of characters but you spend more time with each and every NPC and the one town (Tazmily) itself is more like the main character.

I definitely got that vibe, right? EarthBound is kind of like classic “Hero’s Journey” storytelling. Ness and friends have to go to distant lands, and they have to conquer a big enemy…whereas with MOTHER 3, yeah–it’s about the one town, and it’s a much more inward kind of struggle that the town has. It’s about the deterioration of a community. I kind of look at it like–and hopefully this was something that was kind of made clear with the film–you get to the end and you see what MOTHER 3 was, and you’re thinking: “EarthBound was a really hard game for them to sell, and MOTHER 3 is such a next level experience”. Both games are very, very difficult to capture in like, an advertising slogan or in the kind of way that games are marketed. I mean, they’re really…they’re just such great examples of the video game medium that were so far ahead of their time that the market didn’t really know what to do with them.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And speaking of the film, I wanted to now ask: what initially drew you into the world of filmmaking?

Oh yeah, absolutely. And speaking of the film, I wanted to now ask: what initially drew you into the world of filmmaking?

I was inspired to do what I do today because of a high school video editing class. I realized that creating YouTube content was all of my interests amalgamated like a chimera *snicker* into one hobby! I’ve always loved writing, I have a graphic design background (so Photoshop is really very fun to me), and I’m fascinated by the reactions I can evoke from people via stories that I tell. This all combined under the umbrella topic of video games is my channel!

I was inspired to do what I do today because of a high school video editing class. I realized that creating YouTube content was all of my interests amalgamated like a chimera *snicker* into one hobby! I’ve always loved writing, I have a graphic design background (so Photoshop is really very fun to me), and I’m fascinated by the reactions I can evoke from people via stories that I tell. This all combined under the umbrella topic of video games is my channel!

Yeah, and isn’t it great that there’s a platform now where, not only can you make that content and post it, but you can go as deep as you want and you can amass an audience. It’s a huge new medium for all sorts of storytellers!

100%. So I guess now that we know what inspires each other, I would like to know how you found yourself involved with Fangamer in the first place. What is your day to day at the company like if you don’t mind me asking?

Oh sure, well, I’ll start by talking about how I got involved in Fangamer in general, and then I can go a little more into what my job duties are. So, in film school, a very good friend of mine, Sara Luu–who is one of the other co-producers on this film–graduated a little bit before me, and she ended up working at Fangamer because she had met Jazzy through some local film events here in town. I had even actually ironically (kind of as a freelancer) helped out a little bit with one of the EarthBound, USA shoots, so I knew they were working on the documentary. At that time, I didn’t really know anything about Fangamer. I didn’t know anything about MOTHER; I didn’t know anything about the details of the documentary. I just knew that it was something they were working on. I graduated in the spring of 2019 and kind of tried the freelance thing for a while, and then…in March of 2020…the uh, the COVID pandemic really…came to the United States, and the entire film industry basically shut down. There was just no work, right? Because nothing was being shot…we were all under quarantine due to the deadly virus. So I was just kinda floating around, and then, in July of that year, I got a phone call from Sara & Jazzy. They basically said: “We need to get this documentary finished. We need more help to get there”. Since I had worked on some documentary stuff in college, I said “absolutely”, then I packed up my stuff in my car and drove down to Tucson, and got started through that! My first couple of years at Fangamer were pretty much just exclusively working on the documentary, and that’s been most of my work there. However, recently, as the documentary is kind of entering its final stages of release, I’ve transitioned more into the general video production stuff that they do. It’s a lot of product videography, working on commercial stuff for them, and also just providing as much video support to the company as possible. It’s been a really nice way to stay involved and work with the company while we get the film ready to be seen by everybody.

I also wanted to ask about your unique position as the archival producer for this film! How would you personally define your own role, and what would you say is the most rewarding/challenging aspect of it?

Oh, yes–good question. In our production, a lot of people over the years have helped out on EarthBound, USA. Some people have helped out here & there for longer than others, but ultimately a lot of people have wound up working on the film…especially in the last three years when we were really on the trajectory towards finishing it. We said: “We need to put this out. It needs to be done and done right”. It really was a core team of three producers, Jazzy, our editor Daniel (who came out for a year), and visual effects artist at Fangamer Steven “Everdraed” who did that kind of work. But for a feature-length documentary film, as a very small team. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s an unusually small team, but for the kind of film we were doing, it was very much an independent film in that we were all doing a little bit of everything. We were helping with shoots, we were helping with the editing where we could, but my domain–kind of my big role–was as the archival producer. I’ll explain a little bit about what that job is for your audience: when you’re dealing with a feature-length documentary (something that is going to be shown in movie theaters, or it’s going to be released on DVD and you’re going to be using materials in it), you have to ensure that you are within the boundaries of the copyright law in order to have your film be a legally viable production that can be released and shared with other people. And there’s two kinds of facets to the archival producer job. The first facet is the archival research, which is either going out and trying to find materials for the film, or trying to organize materials that already exist and be there to support the director & editor if they need something. The second part of that is what’s referred to as legal clearances, which is making sure that we can actually use the resources that we have. So, a lot of my job was not only doing the archival research, which was looking through film archives, but also trying to find certain things online. It was trying to track down permissions for what we already had assembled. The other big component of that is fair use…I can talk about fair use a little bit, if you’d like?

Aaron I would love that, because as a YouTuber, fair use and what constitutes fair use is very relevant and interesting to me so please go on!

Yeah, yeah (laughs)–I was thinking about that this morning. I’m really glad I’m able to talk to a YouTuber about this, because it’s a common struggle. So, as anybody who either is a YouTuber or has watched YouTube videos is aware to some degree of fair use. And it is a concept that is very, very important, but I feel is very misunderstood. Basically the way it works is this: in the United States (which is the country where we made the film), the rudimentary background is that if you create something, you automatically own the copyright to it…unless there was some other agreement that was made before it was completed. When you own the intellectual property of something, you have the discretion to be able to allow people to use it if you want, or disallow it if you don’t want them to. But, there is a provision in the copyright law, which is known as fair use. And fair use is essentially a kind of refuge for free speech within our copyright law. So it says that, if I’m going to review a movie, and I need to show a clip from a movie in order to do that review (to make my point to say: “Oh in this scene this happened and what not”), it’s not copyright infringement if I use that clip for that purpose. Right? There’s very specific parameters under which it can be used, but the thing about fair use is that it isn’t a license. It’s not an automatic thing you just select and are granted fair use, it’s a legal defense which would be used in the event of a lawsuit. What you’ll see on YouTube sometimes (and it’s just because of misunderstanding), is somebody posting an entire song, and then in the description, it’ll have this fair use copypasta and…

Yes I see that all the time.

Yeah, I’m reminded of that meme of the kid sleeping in the bed, where the guy’s got his arms outstretched and he’s protecting from the fire or whatever. They think it’s this shield that gives them protection. That’s not really what fair use is, though! So what you have to do when you’re making a film (and I do believe some YouTubers do this, some of the bigger ones who have more resources), is you have to not only be able to find the material, but you have to identify who owns it. Then, if you’re going to invoke fair use for it, you have to use it within these specific parameters. And in order to ensure that you are using this in what would most likely be fair use, you have to work with lawyers. You have to have a legal team be able to basically review a spreadsheet that goes along with the film for every individual item that you want to invoke fair use on, and then they judge whether or not (in their expert opinion) it can be fair use or not. And that allows the film to be insured, right? It’s also a vote of confidence, and for other people to say: “These filmmakers did their due diligence in order to make sure that they’re using material that was not directly licensed”. So for example, something like EarthBound gameplay footage in our film…we had to make sure what we’re doing is not infringing on the intellectual property rights of the copyright owner. In a lot of documentaries, it’s usually not one or the other, like, not everything is going to be fair use, and not everything is going to be licensed. It can kind of be a mixture of both, and that was what our film was. I would say the big difference between fair use on YouTube and fair use in the film world all kind of comes down to the algorithm. We don’t have a robot that is assessing our film and making a decision on it, which means that we don’t have to play by the robot’s rules. We get to play by the law. Which means we have to be certain we’re not doing any sort of copyright or intellectual property infringement. What made this challenging as a film, is that the gray area between what is copyright infringement and what is not copyright infringement is very much the story of being an online fan of a video game (laughs). And so thankfully, we had a really good team of lawyers we were able to work with to ensure that what we did was done right. It was a learning experience for sure. Once we got the guidance, our editors ran with that and it was relatively smooth sailing. We wanted to make sure that this film was following the rules and was going to be releasable. In order to get it to that point, the amount of research and conferring with the lawyers–plus all the spreadsheet work and stuff like that–it’s a lot of labor, but the result is that we can put the film out confidently. We can rest easy knowing that we didn’t step on anybody’s toes in order to do it, legally speaking. From when I first got brought onto the project, and then after the first few months, we realized we want this and we need to do this. It was about two years of back and forth legal work to get everything to the final place where it is today.

Wow, I am just impressed at how meticulous a process it is, and I appreciate you pointing out the differences between fair use on YouTube versus in a film. On YouTube, I was living in fear for about 2 years because Sony was making a lot of copyright claims on EarthBound music in particular (just the Super Nintendo game), so I couldn’t use it for a while. But yeah, the fact that it’s an automated process is a real difference. I have to abide by the robot’s rules as you say, or else I’ll get a copyright strike. You, as an archival producer, work with real people and lawyers to navigate the red tape and get the film ready for distribution.

Yeah, I should also preface and say to anybody listening that I’m not giving legal advice to anybody. I’m only speaking for myself. But in my personal opinion (as just an independent filmmaker), there are times I will watch YouTube videos and think: “in my amateur opinion…eh, this is probably not fair use”. But then there are times I’ll see things get taken down that are probably fair use in a legal setting! And so it’s a really tricky thing. What I’ll say too is that we were very, very fortunate to have a production company and the resources to be able to go through all of this. There’s kind of the question of: “Why aren’t there more independent documentaries about video games?” Things that aren’t necessarily affiliated with the companies that make the games. There are plenty of them out there, but I think it’s very challenging because you’re making something that’s incredibly difficult to thread legally. You have to have a legal team and do it the right way. As the years roll on, it’ll be very interesting to see how copyright law will change and evolve, or stay the same. I joked last night that in my opinion, the copyright laws have kind of barely caught up to the 20th century, but we are now well within the social media age. It makes things more challenging, though there’s a lot of room to learn about how it works!

I also just wanted to–for the audience–kind of steal a question from last night. How do you know so much about the specifics of copyright law? Were you taught a lot of it at your university? How much did you have to learn yourself when you became an archival producer? 

I learned a lot at the University of Arizona film school. We have a fantastic documentary faculty, and I learned a lot about the film industry and film making. But this stuff with the archival producing…it’s a very specialized kind of field within, and so there wasn’t exactly a class on it specifically. I mean, we talked about the legal rules in school, and we had to abide by them with our screenings, right? But I didn’t exactly know a lot of the ins and outs of it, and I wouldn’t necessarily expect an undergraduate degree in film to hit that really hard…just because there’s so many other things to teach. And so it’s not a knock on my school at all. The U of A is a very, very good film school in my opinion, but what happened was, when myself and Brittney Olsen (the other producer) got brought on, it became very apparent that everyone wanted to actually finish this movie and release it formally. So we needed to just make sure that we were doing it as by the book as possible. I forget exactly how it shook out, but what more or less happened was I kind of became in charge of leading that mission (with everyone else’s help of course). And so I purchased a book called Clearance & Copyright: a very like well-known book about all the legal stuff you need to know about being a filmmaker. Reading that book, I kind of got a game plan for how it was going to go down. I took a class a little bit later through this service based out of France that kind of goes more into detail with it too, but from that point it became obvious that we needed to get a team of lawyers. So I flipped the book over and saw the law firm that put out the book and said: “Why can’t we just use these guys?” Thankfully, Fangamer was very open to the idea. And again, I can’t speak on behalf of our lawyers. I don’t represent them at all, but they were a really big help. They were very patient with me, so it was kind of a process of learning while doing, but it was also just one of those things where once we kind of knew the rules and we were able to bring that to the editors, we were able to make it work. It was definitely a learning curve. I also think it just made for a better film in the end, because when you are really in that mindset of: “There are specific materials we are not going to be able to license, and we can only use them in these specific ways”. Well, a lot of the ways that fair use works revolves around good storytelling. What do you need to use this for in order to make your point? You can’t use more than what’s needed, so what is absolutely necessary to tell this narrative? I think it was conducive to trying to fit this massive story into a 100-minute film.

I’m someone who loves deep diving into obscure video game topics. I have a few favorite websites I like to start with, so I was wondering: where do you begin with your own line of work, and how does it develop from there?

With this project, we had a few really big assets. By the time I got involved, most of the interviews–not all of them, but a very large portion of them–were shot and in the can. We had this massive amount of firsthand accounts that were going to make up our interview-based documentary film. And then from there, we have a lot of people at Fangamer who are not only experts in EarthBound, which is very helpful, but they were also around when the whole Starmen saga was going on. We had access to a massive collection of the original Starmen posts, or at least the ones that have survived on the internet…the ones that still exist.

There’s also the Wayback Machine!

Yes, yes. The Wayback Machine. Shout-out to The Internet Archive! I love them. But it would really depend on what part of the film we were working on, because the way documentary film works is that you do a lot of research before the production. And then when you’re actually in the production, you’re sort of shooting it, editing it, and writing it at the same time. That’s unlike a fiction film, where you have a script that is generally done in advance. The editing on a fiction film is very involved right? It’s a big job, but in a documentary, it’s like all of the writing of the film is done in the editing. You obviously still do some of that beforehand when you conduct interviews and go shooting, though. You want to get stuff that’s going to be usable for whatever you’re trying to say. We were kind of working alongside the editing the entire time, pretty much up until the end. Depending on what it was, we would do different levels of research, so when it came to understanding the story–not necessarily looking for materials–we did a lot of different things. We had a general knowledge of it, sure, but there were also specific moments in the film where we really had to just sit down and think. For example, one of the more labyrinthian chapters of this story is the EarthBound 64 days. You have a game with a mysterious production that was perpetually delayed, and a burgeoning fan community that was dealing with said delays for a very long time. And so we ended up creating this master timeline on a document, where we basically took every month from the year, say, 1997 through 2000. We would line everything up with colored blocks and go: “Okay. This line on the grid is every month that EarthBound 64 appeared in the release forecast, and then didn’t appear. Here we have where it showed up in the ‘Most Wanted’ games list”. Then we had a timeline with all of the official announcements that surfaced, and another for when IGN posted something. It allowed us to more clearly see where these patterns go and to just kind of wrap our heads around it. I’m paraphrasing from my memory, but it made you think: “Okay, I notice in this month the game’s off the forecast, but then in these next couple months, it’s now on the ‘Most Wanted’ list. But if I go to the website archives, I can see that there was a coordinated campaign to try to get it onto the ‘Most Wanted’ list at that time”. That sort of preparation is very important when you conduct interviews to make the most of the time and the material. When it came to looking for footage, it depended on what we were doing. So you know, that might involve looking through film archives (for licensing footage). You have to get creative with that…it’s very rare you could go to even a really robust, fantastic news footage archive, search “EarthBound 1995”, and really expect anything to come up! At the time, the game was not that notable, so it wasn’t something that would necessarily be on the radar. But, if you searched “Redmond Washington Nintendo headquarters 1988-1996”, you could actually find information. Another big part of it too was just trying to find collections of printed materials of magazines featuring reviews and stuff like that. A lot of it is getting creative and trying to think: “If there’s something here, and I have this massive collection of materials online or in person, what are creative ways that I can get into that?” Maybe their search terms are not going to find EarthBound, but perhaps they’ll find something about a certain event EarthBound might have been a part of. Another thing that was very, very helpful was working with several really talented people at Mother Forever who (you know), have done a ton of really big research on the games over the last few years. And there’s a lot of other people online: we’re friends with Frank Cifaldi at the Video Game History Foundation, and also locally here in town at the University of Arizona, there’s the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive. The “LGIRA”, which is a massive game archive at the University. As kind of a side note, beyond just being very supportive, they allowed us to use their PlayStation demo stations in some of our reenactments.

That reminds me, does Frank Cifaldi still appear in this final version of the film in any way? I spotted his name in the credits and I know he was in one of the earlier trailers with a speaking part, but I don’t recall seeing him.

One of the things about documentary editing (and something I learned very early in my career) is that you learn as you’re going through what kind of footage needs to be a part of your film, and what kind of footage–no matter how great it is–doesn’t really fit within that version of it. A great example is for one of my student films, I interviewed a couple of people: one of whom was a US congressman! But I got into the editing booth, and had to cut the congressman’s interview out because it didn’t really work for the film. It was great content, and I had a great time with him, but with Frank Cifaldi, yes–Frank and then a few other people gave fantastic interviews, but as we were getting into this story about Starmen in particular, it didn’t fit into that scope. But the good news is that there will be footage from some of the interviews that we shot (but did not use in the film) available as excerpts on the bonus features on the Blu-ray edition of EarthBound, USA!

That was my next question! I heard whispers last night about “the original cut” and it was apparently 2 and 1/2 hours long. Specifically (and Aaron, I don’t even know if I can talk about this), but there was a scene about FINAL FANTASY VII, and the transition between the Golden Age of 2D 16-bit gaming into the third dimension. Could you speak about that at all, what we didn’t get? Or shall we wait until the physical release?

Oh, I can talk kind of generally about it, sure. I’ve probably seen 10 different versions of this film over the years. Like, complete edits of it that have changed. About a year ago, we put in this massive push to get what you would probably call in the film industry “the fine cut”, which is not a rough cut, but one that is very close to the finished product and just needs a little more trimming. One of the things that you find whenever you’re making a documentary about a specific niche or subject, is that you’re kind of towing this line between the documentary containing new information and appealing to people who are…

Coming in with no background or technical knowledge?

Yeah, you want it to make sense without having to be really into it, but you also want it to have enough editorial value that somebody who knows about it isn’t going to watch and think: “Oh okay, I’ve heard all this before”. Right? You want it to appeal to both, and so what can be difficult is, you kind of have to become an expert…or at least know a lot about your subject when you’re making a film. It’s an interesting position where you’ll make a cut of something and go: “This makes sense to me, because I’ve been living in this for years, but I don’t know if this is going to make sense to other people”. I mean, you may have had this experience…I’ve certainly had it when trying to explain this movie to like, my grandparents. You have to start the conversation with: “Okay, so the series is called MOTHER in Japan. But it’s called EarthBound here. So, MOTHER 1 was translated as ‘EarthBound’, but it didn’t come out. So then MOTHER 2 got translated as ‘EarthBound’ and that did come out. But the sequel to EarthBound is called MOTHER 3…etc.” There were a lot of parts of this story on the drawing board that kind of “went into the weeds” as Jazzy says. We thought it was essential information, but over time, as we showed test screenings to some of the Fangamer people, we realized that maybe it’s not as important to this story as some of this other stuff is (like the characters, and EarthBound specifically). What I would say is that I have viewed the longer versions of this film, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that the version you saw–and that everyone else will be seeing–is the best version of the film. It took a lot of work to get there, but I think that readjustments and going down different routes from what had existed before makes for a better film at the end of the day. 

And you successfully made a movie that my wife can join me and watch and appreciate! She hasn’t played much of the MOTHER series, but knows about it for me of course.

Yeah, yeah–and…you know, it’s funny that you mention that, Thane. Because that is something that I would bring up every now and again when we talked about “What’s the movie for?” And I said, “Okay. Imagine a couple is sitting on the couch. One loves EarthBound. The other one knows EarthBound because their partner loves it, but they themselves aren’t as into the series. Can we make a film that is able to exceed their expectations and appeal to both of them?”

Without hitting “pause” and me having to explain something to her.

Yes, absolutely.

I did actually lean over to whisper in her ear once during the screening to tell her that Radiation was Toby Fox, and her eyes lit up! I have a handful of fun questions coming up though…(well, they’re at least fun to me). So, PK Rockin’. PK Love. What would your signature PSI power be? In other words, what’s your favorite thing?

Oh, my favorite thing? Hmm…I would choose PK Sleepin’. I love a good nap.

Oh yes, I like that answer. I think mine would be PK Coffee. I’ll have to go to sleep after this myself, I’m running on empty at the moment…

Yeah, (laughs) yeah that’s good. You know, I’ve played through the opening of EarthBound several times, and one thing I love about it is that you enter all of that information in at the beginning, and then forget about it. So it’s always surprising when it comes back up on screen later on! It’s a testament to the genius of that game.

Yep, it’s super effective! I’ve seen many threads people have created online asking why Ness’s power is called PK whatever, which is pretty funny. My next question though: If your life were a game–that game specifically being MOTHER 4–how would it compare to the rest of the series?

If my life were MOTHER 4. That’s a good question. I think that it would probably be a more boring version of EarthBound. This was something that I really picked up–not just from playing EarthBound, but also just kind of learning more about Itoi and the game–is that the stuff he put into it (and the stuff that is in a lot of MOTHER-like games that have come out of the EarthBound fandom), is really relatable humor based in real life…even if it’s an extreme sci-fi version of it. We all knew a Pokey/Porky Minch in school, for example. He didn’t necessarily assist a Lovecraftian eldritch horror and, you know, travel to a different dimension…but um, we all knew a kid like that, right? I would say EarthBound without the aliens is probably more what my life would be like.

Excellent, I agree, and I might just ask that the creator turn down the difficulty a little bit in an update or a patch…but that’s not important at all. What is important is Mayonnaise Hole! Aaron, may I ask–what is a Mayonnaise Hole?

I’m very glad you asked that question…this is actually really funny. My first ever experience with Fangamer was briefly appearing at their Halloween party. I was a guest of Sara’s…she worked there at the time, and they were all playing Mayonnaise Hole when I walked in. Basically, Mayonnaise Hole…I’m not sure where it started. Experts disagree… I like to believe that people have been playing Mayonnaise Hole for many hundreds of years, but I believe it began at conventions or something. The idea is there’s a tube…(it can be a paper towel or toilet paper roll tube) that is set up straight, and you have a fishing pole with a tiny packet of mayonnaise on it. Like, one of those little ones you can get at a cafeteria. You have to stand behind a certain point and cannot cross the line, but the goal is to get this mayonnaise packet into the hole…it’s all spaced out in such a way that makes it very, very difficult. It’s a really fun game. It’s a great party game, and I will say this: one of our co-workers at Fangamer, Jack Murphy, has created a VR game for Mayonnaise Hole where you can play Mayonnaise Hole off of a skyscraper, you can play it on top of a moving truck, and do all of sorts of things. And so Mayonnaise Hole…I really think it’s America’s game. America’s pastime. It’s a classic.

That VR game is how I became aware of this local–now global–legend.

It’s a very fun game. He really…(laughs) it’s a hoot. Yeah, I’m glad that the Mayonnaise Hole tradition lives on.

So another quick thing: I saw that you were credited as a prop designer on the film…is that correct? I wanted to ask about that. Did you have a hand in the big clearance bin of EarthBound boxes that was on display yesterday outside of the theater? I almost missed that, I just about walked right by it. I’m so happy I went back!

I did not get involved with or build that specific one. You know what’s funny, is that we put it out there because we had all these fake EarthBound boxes as props, right? I mean, we weren’t going to spend $50,000 on buying a giant crate full of mint condition EarthBound boxes, so we created prop versions of them. We set them up as an installation outside the movie theater…but we had to run back over and (laughs) write on the sign: “Don’t take them with you”, because we saw people going in and taking them! Which, you know, I don’t blame them. But yeah, when it comes to the prop making, we had a great co-producer/production designer: Sara Luu, and Steve Campos (our visual effects artist) who did a lot of work in the props department (in terms of getting some of those boxes and assets that could be printed). As I said before, it was kind of an all hands on deck thing and I do have some Photoshop skill, so in some of the reenactments–of which there are quite a few in the documentary–there are little props here and there that I helped make for it. Off the top of my head I can’t think of a particular example of something I made, but it was a lot of: “Oh man, we need an insert on this desk. We need something to put on the desk that we can legally clear. Uh, let’s just make something in Photoshop that’ll work for that”.

I also saw your name pop up a few times in the film, not counting the credits. For example, I saw that you were listed at the bottom right of a yearbook. And then, there was a screen name that said something like “Aaron Car Guy” on a Starmen.Net forum. I was wondering at first if that was your actual username on Starmen, but it doesn’t sound like it because you came to the EarthBound community later on. So, was that just a wild coincidence, or a little Easter egg?

Here’s how that worked. A lot of the material in the film that you see from the website is material we pulled straight from Starmen.Net, but there are times in a documentary where you have reenactments. Actors playing characters in order to take a lot of history and kind of confine it into one scene for the purposes of the movie. And so because of that, there were these instances where we’d have 50 comments of something on an actual page that all pointed to the same idea, but we needed something that was going to kind of put them together succinctly into one comment. And with stuff like that, it had to all fit on the screen, but it was not a literal thing we could pick from the website. So what I did in a couple of cases was use my own name, just because I didn’t have to legally clear it. It was my name, right? I can do whatever I want with my name. There were other instances where we had to either cover things or replace them, like that shot of the yearbook. We weren’t going to put real people’s names from that yearbook in there, so…

That’d be a whole other process of acquiring permission to use those names.

Yes, yeah, I mean, I don’t know about the fair use of whether we could or could not have just left them as is, but we didn’t want to. We just wanted to throw a couple of our names in certain effect shots that needed that sort of thing, and I think our co-editor Daniel Maggio thought it was funny…so I’m in the film quite a bit. There’s a couple of shots, like the EarthBound Zero ROM getting slammed into the ROM dumper…that’s my hand. So yeah, there’s a lot of little things like that. But it’s all kind of par for the course when you’re making a documentary with reenactments.

Well I got a kick out of it. Another funny thing in the film I noticed I just wanted to quickly mention: there’s one part where you’re showing how the oversized EarthBound box that–while attention grabbing–was actually a curse at the time, because retail workers couldn’t fit them in with the other games. The scene was effective, because a time-lapse plays out showing shoppers grabbing everything but EarthBound. There’s one girl who chose Bubsy over EarthBound and that broke my heart a little bit (laughs), but I thought it was funny. Was that an intentional jab that even notorious games like Bubsy were being picked over EarthBound, or could it have been any game?

Oh, it wasn’t a jab at any particular game. What it was, is that we were creating this game store set. And as we were learning about fair use, we really wanted it to feel as authentic as possible. The store is a fictional store, with a fictional logo and such, but the idea was that we really wanted to show EarthBound in the context of when it came out. We were originally thinking: “Are we going to have to put a bunch of fake designed knockoff games in there?” Through work with our lawyers though, we were able to find out that we could use real games that were available around the time that EarthBound came out! I’m not going to claim that we got everything 100% accurate or anything, but a lot of those games were contemporary titles. And so for that scene, we really just wanted to have that image of “time is passing; the window is closing. These beautiful EarthBound boxes at the bottom are just neglected while everyone else is going in with these other games”. It was filmed basically as it was: a giant line over the course of about five minutes. The extras were sort of instructed as follows: “You walk in, okay? You take that one. You take this one.” It was all to make sure we had even coverage of it, since you want a balanced image for it. And so yes–I would not choose Bubsy over EarthBound. But perhaps…you know, the 90s were a different time.

I understand that you came onto the project later on, but during production, was there an added pressure to work faster because of Kickstarter backers that had been following the project since 2014? What were the reactions to perhaps…negative responses to the delays within Fangamer?

Our Kickstarter backers are the reason that this project is what it is, you know? We felt a big obligation to get something out that was going to satisfy them. It’s tough to back something and wait for many, many years as it goes over schedule. There was a ton of support from a lot of our backers, and they were incredibly patient, too. They were essentially the thing that kept everything moving because at the end of the day, no matter what problems or issues came up with the production, we had to make sure that they got their copy of it. I mean, I owe my job to the Kickstarter backers, so overall, we’re just happy to be able to give them what they’re owed. My hope is that they will see their role that got us to this point, as it would have been literally impossible without them.

Was there a certain point that you would really…hesitate to make more edits and delay the film further if, say, Nintendo dropped a bombshell like announcing an EarthBound remake, or even MOTHER 3? Did you hope that Nintendo didn’t announce anything more major involving the series until EarthBound, USA was out?

That’s a very good question. There was part of me. I’m not going to lie to you, that would think during a new Nintendo Direct: “Not today. Not today. Not today…” Although, that’s also tempered by the fact that after working on this for so many years, I was simultaneously thinking: “You guys really do need to release this game”. I wanted to have hope that the game would come out! So it was kind of a balance. But here’s how it played out for the film: we got to a certain point in the edit–about a year or two in–when we realized that the actual story that we’re telling would not change that much if at the 11th hour, the game was released. Because it wouldn’t have erased all these years of waiting. It wouldn’t have changed the core of the Starmen generation’s story.

Right, their story over the span of 20 or so years!

Yes, yeah. Over a really long time. And so, if it had come out before we finished the film, we would’ve had to acknowledge it. We couldn’t have the title card that reads: “It hasn’t come out yet”, but it would really be the chapter of a new story in the EarthBound fandom. I mean, it would be a totally new era. And I think that our film is about how we got to the current era. We kind of got to a point where we didn’t really worry too much about it, but I will be honest, in working at Fangamer, every time those Directs came on (again, I’d have that thought of: “I don’t want to deal with this today, please don’t announce MOTHER 3”), but then on the other hand, I’d think: “If they’re gonna announce this game, I want them to announce it while I’m here with these people”. Because it’s going to be a major celebration. It’s gonna be like the end of Return of the Jedi or something like that.

Yes, it could make for a nice new line to cap off the film: “And so MOTHER 3 was finally released”.

Yeah, but I’ll say this too: Clyde’s translation–and this is again in my opinion–Clyde’s translation is a world-class translation of that game. I think that his translation is excellent.

And perhaps more faithful than an official translation by Nintendo would be!

Yeah, in my personal opinion, yes! I think it would be. But who knows, right? We did talk to one games journalist a couple of years ago who made a really good point, which was that they’re still hoping for the official release, because they want MOTHER 3 to be more easily accessible so that it can enter the video game canon. And so there’s a lot of arguments to be made on either side of the issue. We’ve already got this excellent translation, but alternatively, there is something to be said about the game being able to exist officially in the west. One of the biggest things I’ve noticed about the difference between MOTHER fans of that era and MOTHER fans today is that there’s a lot of very young fans. People who are my age and younger. Those born in the late 90s or in the aughts. “Gen Z” as they call them. And for people of our generation, MOTHER 3 has been out since we were kids! It hasn’t been out officially, but the translation has. And so the quest for MOTHER 3 seems to be a lot less central, at least from my outsider’s perspective. Though what I have seen is the interest in EarthBound 64 explode.

Yes, it’s incredible what this generation of fans have unearthed in all of this time that’s passed. Like Mother Forever archiving the MOTHER 3 Times. I know Kody NOKOLO found and had those publications scanned, then sent directly over through the National Diet Library of Japan. It’s just incredible to see the new and interesting things that have been discovered and preserved all these years later.

Yeah, and I think that all of us get kind of enchanted by the mystery of it. I definitely was when I researched it, and it’s just really interesting seeing how much MOTHER 3 has become part of mainstream gaming culture. When you have things like the Old Spice Collaboration Team incorporating MOTHER 3 art into their video…

…and Terry Crews sharing it, then posting about a MOTHER 3 localization on Twitter!

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how it gets much better than that. Another thing that I learned about the MOTHER fanbase that I really like is that they’re a great example of an online community (which was as true back then as it is today), that is able to take their love for the series and then spin it in their own creative directions. We debuted our trailer as part of the Mother Direct earlier this year, so we watched the whole fan Direct leading up to our reveal. It’s great that there’s not only so many really good-looking EarthBound fan games, but also that it’s a platform for MOTHER-like indie games. It’s become a community that’s about EarthBound and people making their own games inspired by it. It’s a very supportive group of people that fosters a lot of creativity.

Yes, definitely! Motherlike… I love that descriptor. Kody NOKOLO claims he wasn’t the one to coin the term, but he and the Mother Forever staff certainly helped push it into public awareness with the Mother Directs.

Yeah, Motherlike. It’s a really snappy name. It sounds like it could be an alternative rock band from the 90s (laughs). Some of those games looked pretty cool.

EarthBound, USA will become publicly available on November 27th of this year. What do you hope audiences will take away from it, and what comes next for you?

Yes: EarthBound, USA’ will be publicly available digitally on the 27th of November. We are still getting some of the specifics of that ironed out, but if you go to fangamer.com or to earthboundusa.com, the information will be there. You can also follow our Twitter (X)/socials, and sign up for our newsletter to be updated about how to get it when the time comes. What I hope people take away from the film is a couple of things: I really hope people just enjoy it and they have a good time watching, but more than that, I hope that it will ring true for everyone who’s an EarthBound fan. I also hope that it speaks to people who grew up on the internet. One of the things that really struck me with this movie is that it’s so rare to find any film, really, that’s centered around what it was like to be on an internet forum back then. Or what it was like to have online friends before today, where all of our friends are online friends. Right? It was this time where a lot of us grew up…I mean, I was part of an internet message board (it wasn’t EarthBound related, I was a BIONICLE man myself, LEGOs), but I think there’s a lot in the movie about what it means to grow up and make connections in that new medium. What it means to grow up loving something, and how to kind of deal with that as you’re growing up…as more responsibilities pile on and stuff like that. I guess I would say that I hope people are able to see themselves and their own experience in it. In terms of what’s next, our director (Jazzy Benson), is going to be working on a new project. I can’t say much about it, but it is a fiction film. A suburban, southwestern cyberpunk narrative film. So if you like cyberpunk, and you like the quirky lens in which Jazzy views the world (as you can see in this film), definitely follow her and stay tuned. As for myself, I will be working on that as well, and I hope to be a part of some more documentary projects coming up. I guess if I were to plug anything (other than the film of course), it would be my new dedicated Instagram account: @arizonaincinerated. That’s “incinerated” like a piece of paper gets burnt up or whatever. And my hope is that it’ll be a project where I’ll be able to share some of my documentary research about Arizona history. If you don’t live in Arizona, it is actually very interesting. But Jazzy’s new project is going to be great, and we’re still really hoping to have some more fun with EarthBound, USA while we can!

I suppose I just have just one last question for you: Which style of windows do you prefer? We’ve got plain flavor, mint, strawberry, banana, peanut, grape, or melon.

Well, I normally play with plain, but I do like mint too. So either plain or mint.

That’s exactly my answer! The world of EarthBound is already pretty vibrant, so I like to have that contrast to keep it easily readable. I do find mint to be quite pleasant, though. 

I like that, you gotta have the fast text speed too, you know…

I wonder if anyone has ever played through EarthBound at the slow text speed. I’d be impressed by their patience.

I’ve never met anybody who has, though I feel it could be great for accessibility. Like if a player were familiar with English, but as a second language. When I personally play it, I appreciate the zippiness of the fast text. It’s actually funny, we were all watching it last night and as the EarthBound gameplay footage appeared, it was set at the fast speed…and I was thinking: “Should we have made that slower? I don’t know…” That being said, it is more authentic to a lot of the recorded gameplay footage you see online.

That last point you made is a great one, I’ve often thought to myself about the text speed I’ve chosen for videos! Sometimes I’ll need footage of a particular line, but I’ll realize that I had it scrolling too fast during the gameplay session, so I’ll have to go back and re-record in some cases. EarthBound is nice though, because the world stays still while you’re engaged in dialogue, so the only thing that moves is the flashing arrow to proceed the text box. Because of that, I can just go in and make a series of edits using the cropped animation of the blinking arrow to prolong the text box for as long as I need it on screen. That way, I don’t have to replay up until a certain part of the game just for one line (because that takes forever)!

Yeah, yeah I know, it’s so different than if you’re using a clip from a film in your movie…let’s say you either licensed it or you fair used it. You have a nice copy of the clip and you just zip around your editing timeline, find the part that you want, and then plop it in there. With a game? Not quite that simple. (Laughs), you have to…it takes a little bit more thought to get that moment you need out of it.

That’s right, and as a YouTuber, I’m only using a few seconds of film at a time anyway. I’ve got to be very careful about that!

Yeah…you have my sympathies.

Okay! Well, I believe we’ve gone over everything that I wanted to cover, and I thought it was a very enlightening conversation. I learned a lot–I appreciate you for taking the time to speak with me. It was truly a golden opportunity for me.

Yeah! We’re currently recording this before the wide release of the film, and there’s only so many people who’ve seen it. I saw you made that post about doing a video review, and I thought: “You’re here in town, so let’s collaborate”. I really appreciate you for coming out to it. I mean, really. When you work on something for so long, and for so long it’s just something that you’re watching over and over again…I mean, I’ve now seen the final film probably 15 times. Just because you have to when you make a movie.

Yep, just like the final check of a YouTube video before it goes live!

Yeah, exactly, right? And so it’s really, really nice to have such a welcoming crowd of people who were engaged and wanted to come out to support it. Thank you!

It was a pleasure to meet you, Aaron. I’m happy I was able to go in person and shake your hand.

Yeah me too–as people were walking in I was thinking: “Okay. I’ve seen his pixel art character, so I know what the sprite of him looks like. Hmm… who’s got the goatee…”

That’s funny, I actually got my haircut right beforehand. I was looking a little like Bob Ross, so I had to trim it down a little bit.

(Laughing) Yeah, uh, did you get that Mother Direct shirt from Mother Forever? Or was that something you made?

I actually did get it from Mother Forever, they collaborated with…have you heard of JobJob LLC?

Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yup, they uh, they actually have them for sale on their website! There are stickers as well, but I just had to snatch that T-shirt after the Direct. Mostly everyone featured on there are original game characters from Motherlikes. But yeah, I just wanted to show my support for Mother Direct and Mother Forever…I love what they’re doing and it’s great to see the torch being passed along. I know Starmen is still around–it’s this pillar of the community, and I’m happy it exists because we can always go back and dig through the archives. I still actually visit Starmen fairly often for research! It’s where I first heard about folks like Kenisu, who provided original drawings for my history of the MOTHER novels video. I wouldn’t have known about his attempts to translate the first MOTHER book by Saori Kumi (before Nyaasu Nekoban) without browsing old Starmen threads. It’s inspiring to me that there’s always people discovering this series for the first time, and I love welcoming new fans in.

You know, it’s interesting when you talk about passing the torch. It was definitely a hope that we had with this project, in allowing an opportunity for the newer generation of fans to get to know the older generation. We also celebrated that passing of the torch moment through working with Mother Forever. I really do feel like the current generation of fans (through their research, game design, and everything else), are really just taking things to the next level. And so it’s very exciting. I feel the same way about film, where it’s just wonderful when younger people can discover an old movie and recognize its brilliance. You know what I mean? It’s not quite an intergenerational dialogue, but at the same time…it kind of is.

Aaron, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for hearing me out, thanks for speaking with me, and I have a lot to work with for this little interview here. You’re a wonderful person.

(Laughs) Yeah! Thank you, you did great. It’s nice to have a casual conversation. I enjoyed it, you asked good questions.

Where did you first discover the MOTHER series, and how did you feel during your first experience with it?

I had heard about Earthbound and the Mother series quoted around the internet growing up and found it was a game with a pretty big cult following even back then. It wasn’t until I stumbled onto Starmen.net and the fan games there that I started to fall in love with the series and the material it inspired. I specifically remember being on a road trip to Canada at the time, and with not much to do except use my phone, I subsequently fell down the rabbit hole of Mother-inspired fangames and admired their pixel art and often offbeat gamefeel.

Do you have a favorite game in the series and why?

Earthbound was the first game I learned about, mostly in creepy gaming rumors and theories, and that always piqued my interest whenever it was being discussed on the internet. But I was able to experience Mother 3 a little more directly watching a Let’s Play and found it incredibly endearing both mechanically and graphically. It’s definitely easy to see the Mother 3 inspiration with my pixel art as well.

What are some of your favorite characters, songs, locations, and moments from the series?

Pollyanna (I Believe in You) is a really great track, and I remember watching the Animated Earthbound Tribute and was surprised that song came from a video game, instead of a movie or musical. That was pretty wild to me. A thing mechanically I remember, is Poo being on a special diet, and him recovering differently when eating Western foods. I remember feeling somewhat the same when I was younger, when I’d bring lunch to school and it’d be culturally different/distinct from what everyone else had or what they served in the cafeteria. It was a small detail they chose to convey through the language of video games and that was pretty neat.

Which aspects of the MOTHER series were the most inspiring for you?

It’s definitely the great amount of fangames, I remember going through the rabbit hole the first time and seeing the wide, wide variety of games out there, but still under the same umbrella.

Did you ever interact much with the community on Starmen.net? If you did, what was your first impression of that community?

Starmen.net is where I found most of the fangame community and their projects. Eventually when I started game development, the fangames forum was where I wanted to first post my projects; and still do.

What were your favorite experiences you’ve had with the MOTHER community?

Aside from experiencing all the fan-made content and watching videos revolving around the Mother series, I hadn’t been involved with the community as much. But I do remember posting my first commercial project on Starmen.net and getting a lot of encouragement and feedback at the time.

Our website and members of its community have been discovering many previously lost pictures and information about the N64 version of MOTHER 3 recently. Do you have any strong opinions or other thoughts on that version of the game?

It’s interesting to think that Mother 3 could’ve been a 3D game and N64 title and it’s great that that development history is being unearthed now. Would love to see more details when it surfaces!

Did you deliberately decide to include any particular MOTHER tropes in any of your games, including Sorry We’re Open?

Aside from visual and style inspirations, I’ve always loved the way the combat screen looked aesthetically, in all the games. Although inspiration may have transcended the series at this point and there may be things I included naturally that were the result of the Mother series’ impact on games’ today.

Are there many times where it’s difficult for you to get motivated to make things, and is there anything you tend to do to get yourself motivated when you need to work on something?

I’m finding a lot of inspiration from TV, animation, and movies all the time, and when it does get difficult to commit to finishing a project, it does help to top off on inspiration fuel; step back and do other things that may or may not revolve around your work. It never hurts to pull from a wider variety of places.

What were your expectations at the beginning of your work on Sorry We’re Open, especially after having worked on your other games, and how does the game differ from those expectations now that it’s done?

I actually went into Sorry, We’re Open with a much smaller scope focusing on just the text-based adventure aspect. Previous games have had both exploration and text-based segments, but I wanted to experiment more with roguelite mechanics, and the text-based segments made an easier use for that. Eventually it grew into a similar RPG hybrid, just like previous entries, with exploration and text-based segments and all. By the end of development, it did feel like I was designing 2 different games that occupied the same space; though I can imagine the change of pace would help during longer play times.