“Do you have plans for MOTHER 4?”

For the time being we have to get MOTHER 3 out. We were working on the concept of MOTHER 3 while MOTHER 2 was still in development. However, the production difficulties associated with MOTHER 3 have demoralized us to the point where we don’t want to do a “4.” Besides, mentioning another sequel would get me in trouble. “

This is a short excerpt from a March 2000 issue of 64 Dream, while MOTHER 64 was still in development. While the game still wasn’t out and met with yet another delay, the journalists still threw out the question of a fourth game in the MOTHER series. At the time, the team was so occupied with getting MOTHER 64 out the door that they had not even considered the possibility of a MOTHER 4! Over time, when faced the difficulty of developing the game, Itoi became more and more hesitant about creating a fourth entry in the series. What began as a thought of “let’s focus on MOTHER 3 first”, eventually became “MOTHER 3 is the final game in the series.”

On the night of MOTHER 3’s release on April 20th, 2006, a livestream was held where Itoi answered many questions about the game. When asked about a fourth game, he immediately responded, “There won’t be a fourth”, unfortunately closing the curtains on the MOTHER series as we knew it. While the story could’ve ended just like that, many over the years still persisted with the question of the series possibly continuing! Just a few months later in an article with Nintendo Dream, they exclaimed to Itoi, “Let’s make a MOTHER 4!”, to which he humorously responded, “Making MOTHER 3 was already difficult enough for me! I’d like to be the player now”.

Could this really be the end for the MOTHER series after so many years of touching people’s lives? Not necessarily. In the same interview, Itoi did admit, “…if someone were to come up to me and say, ‘I’d like to make a MOTHER 4,’ I might just say, ‘Sure, go ahead!’ Yeah, if there was a MOTHER 4, I’d really love to play it”. This quote inspired many fans to create their own interpretations of what MOTHER 4 could be, resulting in many wondrous ideas and fangames. Itoi himself has even had fun with this extension of what MOTHER 4 could possibly be, even proclaiming that, “Animal Crossing is MOTHER 4!” However, as much enjoyment as everyone was receiving from the freedom of entitlement of what MOTHER 4 was, many still wanted to hear more from the official source. This influenced Yasuhiro Nagata, board member of Itoi’s company, Hobonichi, to reunite Itoi and Satoru Iwata for one last discussion about MOTHER 4. This meeting was held on February 7th, 2011, at Nintendo’s headquarters in Kyoto.

“So I of course told him, ‘No, you already know I’m not going to make a MOTHER 4’. To which he replied, ‘Fans will be glad just to hear you say it again, after all this time.’”

Shigesato Itoi immediately dismissed MOTHER 4 at the beginning of the interview, but understood that Nagata made this meeting a reality due to being an enormous fan of the series himself (which is what led him to being hired at Hobonichi). Itoi opens up in this interview that his perspective on the series had changed over time, being able to really appreciate the three games he had created, and witnessing how they had grown up with the people that played them as children. He felt, had he been the player all along, he would’ve really loved the games and wanted to meet other fans of them too, yearning for that experience a creator of a series never has. 

With his child grown up, Itoi felt the MOTHER series no longer belonged to him, but the world he gifted it to.

“Looking back at the MOTHER series, I feel like I had a reason for making MOTHER 1 through 3. But now my kid is all grown up. The feeling of, ‘I want a MOTHER 4 to be released!’ is inside me, too. Even if it’s not something I need to do, I still feel that way. Still, there isn’t someone for me to watch over from afar anymore. If there were a fourth game, I’d want to be the player.”

When asked by Nagata how Iwata felt, Iwata hesitated and said that if there were a MOTHER 4, it couldn’t be made with the same production system of the previous games. To close off the article, and the story of the long-fabled MOTHER 4, Itoi relayed this last statement: 

“‘The very lives you’re living now are MOTHER 4.’ I really feel that way. ‘Today we had lots of ridiculous thoughts, today we felt sadness, today we laughed a lot’. That’s what I had set out to do within the world of those games”.

When Shigesato Itoi spoke about MOTHER 4 in a 2015 interview with Game Watch Express, he revealed that he felt it was impossible for him to make another installment that would live up to the first three, saying:

“Among big-time popstars, if they, you know, put out ten albums, around the fourth album, they can’t make very good songs. The albums sell, but everyone at the concerts wants to hear songs from those first three albums. Everyone”.

Itoi most recently spoke about MOTHER 4 to Weekly Playboy in 2019. For the first time, he actually commented on what could happen in his version of MOTHER 4,

“I wouldn’t make it (laughs). But, if it happened now, I think it would be in a different way. I’d like it to feature a love story. … It’s a pretty ordinary feeling that still leaves more to be explored. Like, take songs for example. There’s more to love songs that make them famous. So, that theme of romantic love would definitely be at the heart of it.”

While Hobonichi still produces MOTHER merchandise occasionally, an official MOTHER 4 game just remains as a metaphysical idea. Maybe, MOTHER 4 stands for what the series represents as a whole, the messages Itoi wanted to convey through the games, and the games that were inspired by the series today! In a way, MOTHER fans have created all kinds of different games and projects that are their own kinds of MOTHER 4. To read more about these kinds of projects inspired by MOTHER, check out our MOTHER 4 Timeline!