Ever wanted to full rundown of how this site came to be?
You’re in the right place! Read through our website timeline below to get an idea of how Mother Forever made it to this point.

Fall-Winter 2019: Kody NOKOLO begins planning a video game research project that has to do with how stories involve their players in games along with making a game called GNOMONIC that uses those techniques. Although the project isn’t centered on MOTHER, Kody attempts to find and translate MOTHER-related sources from Japan’s National Diet Library to use for the project.

While searching for other sources to cite for their project on the Starmen.net Forums, Kody finds and joins a Discord server dedicated to researching and documenting EarthBound 64. They arrive and notice everyone is trying to find lost information and images related to a series of articles about the game called “The MOTHER 3 Times.”

After noticing that the series of magazines everyone is searching for, Dengeki Nintendo 64, is all available through the Diet Library thanks to the knowledge from their research project, they let everyone know and order the first of many previously lost scans. After posting the first scans in the server, researcher Orangeisborange approaches with the idea to create a website with Kody and another researcher, Echoes, that can host the new information Kody is finding along with all the information everyone had been researching about EarthBound 64. Kody agrees to help with the site, but suggests it should cover the whole series instead of just the Nintendo 64 information. Orange designs the site while their roommate Shen programs it. Kody works on getting more scans during this time and posts updates on Discord.

January 2020: The site begins taking a physical form and throughout the month, Orange and Echoes begin writing the first pages for the site. Orange’s first designs involve all the MOTHER games, Super Smash Bros., and the Motherlike indie game ODDITY, originally a fan game called MOTHER 4. Shane Mesa, composer of ODDITY, is interviewed for the site’s new YouTube channel. After preparing the site and discussing whether ODDITY should be the only indie game included on the site amongst themselves and with ODDITY developers, the team decided against including it. The YouTube channel launched, and the first video is the interview with Shane.

February-March 2020: Orange and Echoes continue writing the last pages the site needs before launching. Kody translates and scans more EarthBound 64 information before the launch. The site launches at the end of February along with a new Mother Forever Discord server. Work continues into March as new pages are added to it regularly to complete its information. There were even new Mother Forever Forums that launched alongside the site.

Spring 2020: Orange begins planning and organizing the first Mother Direct in March. A new admin joins the team around that time and helps with designs for the website and the Direct: BONES. Another admin joins to help with editing the writing on the site: 8lackSphinx. BONES provides assets to Orange for the intro and other segments of the Direct, who combines them with the assets provided by the participating projects to create the Direct. Echoes writes the script for Orange to use throughout the presentation and Kody helps with extra editing Orange can’t get to like the Patreon trailer and credits. Although it was difficult with only a few months’ notice, it happens without a hitch, but our community on the Mother Forever Discord server grows to uncomfortable proportions for Orange and Echoes and continues on this path as the year moves on.

Summer-Winter 2020: After being exhausted by the Direct, Orange decides to take a break from making things for site, leaving it mostly up to Echoes and Kody. Echoes added new things to the site while Kody kept up with Hobonichi’s announcements, prepared for the second Mother Direct, and finished college. BONES left the team shortly after the Direct. Orange returned eventually, but came back feeling very overwhelmed and pressured when it came to community interactions on the Mother Forever Discord, and proposed to close these interactions with the community entirely. Echoes and Kody, not realizing all the pressure Orange was feeling, went along with the decision for the good of the team. Feeling bad about the situation already, Kody took it upon themselves to deliver the news for Orange and do the closing. The website and social media channels stayed up of course, but by the end of the year, community interactions through Discord were closed. All community interactions were encouraged to be through the Mother Forever Forums instead. Echoes and Kody continued posting site updates, with extra help even being added by writers like SeasonalSpirit and Lone.

2021: Into this year, the team became more quiet, with Echoes continuing to update the site, and Kody alone being the one to assemble the 2021 Direct. Kody also tried to use the YouTube channel to stream a fan game they never tried before for the community, Cognitive Dissonance. They posted an interview with Reid Young that they had been editing for a few months, and they also posted an interview with CogDis’s director, who they reached out to while playing through the game.

Just before the Direct, Orange suddenly severed all ties with Mother Forever. Worried about the deletion of the site on its “motherforever.net” domain, Kody backed up and restored all work on the site to a new domain, “mother4ever.net,” to continue as usual with everyone. Orange eventually gave Kody’s indie game studio NOKOGODO the ownership of the original motherforever.net, and from then on, Kody become the site’s new webmaster and benefactor as a part of their work for NOKOGODO. The one thing that couldn’t be recovered were the unfortunately deleted forums. Now that Kody was leading things, and with the forums lost, one of the first things they decided to do with the still remaining staff was to bring back the Discord server. Alongside the now complete 2021 Direct, the server returned. Kody and Echoes worked on more news updates until near the end of the year, and Kody prepared again for another Direct alongside finding many new scans that they would prepare to post next year.

2022: Echoes continues updating the site while Kody prepares a regular update schedule for the YouTube channel, starting with new interviews with Motherlike indie developers. In the lead up to the 2022 Direct, Kody posts all the new scans they had been finding, including lost designs of MOTHER 3 by Shinichi Kameoka. The next Direct is done and launches with the announcement of the indie developer interviews. Kody continues to post “Almost Monthly News” video updates alongside a variety of community interviews as a way to replace the written updates on the site, a mode of reaching people that Kody found more effective, especially for people that were already subscribed on YouTube because of the Directs. By the end of the year, Echoes and 8lackSphinx decided their work was done, and moved on from Mother Forever. In the preparations for the 2023 Direct, Kody began getting in contact with graphic artists to update BONES’ old graphics for the Direct and with merchandise creators to create things that can orient the events towards donations for charity.

2023: Kody continues to post “Almost Monthly News” updates, and thinks of the idea to show a movie about EarthBound Beginnings, Mother To Earth, during a panel at PAX East so more people can find out about the documentary and learn about the series. The Mother To Earth team works with Kody to show the movie there, and they plan to play it at Too Many Games again later that year. Kody launches the Direct a month later than usual, on the anniversary day of the series. It’s the largest event yet with the most projects and the biggest announcements, including charity merchandise illustrated by ODDITY artist With a Hint of Lemon, the launch of the MOTHER: Encore demo, and the release date for the long awaited EarthBound movie, EarthBound USA.

2024: Like they did for Mother To Earth last year, Kody teams up with the EarthBound USA team to moderate a panel for the movie at PAX East! While working on the next Mother Direct, Kody begins a new podcast focused on indie RPGs called RPG Potential. The Direct airs, where Kody reveals that it is the final Mother Direct they’ll be making, with plans to evolve the shows into more broad and inclusive RPG Direct presentations in the future because they see that direction as the best way to continue the legacy of Shigesato Itoi, Satoru Iwata, and MOTHER moving forward. To align with the new goal of showcasing indie RPGs and since all of the posts made on the Mother Forever YouTube and Twitter were all published, written, and video edited by Kody anyways, they decided to update these accounts to become NOKOGODO, Kody’s indie game studio that has owned and paid for the site since 2021. Just as Mother Forever began with finding new MOTHER information during the creation of GNOMONIC, its life is book ended with an announcement of a demo for the game and an announcement that the full game will include the work of MOTHER 3 composer Shogo Sakai.

Although Mother Forever will remain available as a source for all the information compiled in it over its five years of activity, now it lives on with fans of the games who decide to create something new with what MOTHER inspired in them. Whatever those creations might be – the choices we make in our daily lives, a video presentation, a game, or a website – it all is sure to continue our POTENTIAL just the same!