Let’s begin by asking about your background with the MOTHER series. Where did you first discover the games and how did you feel during your first experience with them?

Well, I think the first encounter I had [with the MOTHER series] was Nintendo Power. I think the first time I heard of it was from the [volume with the] NBA Jam cover. Reading about [EarthBound] and seeing the clay models and the little world they prepared and showed in Nintendo Power had me totally hooked. So, when I saw there was a coupon [for EarthBound], I said, “That’s it, I am mowing lawns, I’m saving money, I’m gonna do this!” I begged my parents to drive me into the nearest town because I lived out in the sticks. We drove to Target and picked up EarthBound as soon as I knew it was available. That was the beginning of that, that was ’95. I think it was late summer, maybe fall, of ’95. I fell in love; I played through EarthBound and Chrono Trigger during the next summer nonstop. That was a wonderful summer.

What were your experiences with the MOTHER series and its community leading up to the development of MOTHER FOREVER?

When I first got involved, I was out there on my own. Back in around 1996 or so when I first got on the internet, I did some searching and found a half-site or a page on someone’s site that talked about EarthBound, but there was really no information about it. So, I started building my own page on my site, and people somehow came to that. As the community around my site started to build, I started to learn that there were other things out there. I’d never been on AOL, but apparently there was an AOL group called the “EarthBound Gang” and another one called “Sharks.” There were all these things out there that I had no idea existed because searching was so primitive back then. Having my horizons expanded bit-by-bit before Starmen.net formed out of Earthbound.net. It really was the place to be [and] there wasn’t a whole lot of undiscovered territory at that point. We all conglomerated around this one website. It was an exciting time to be a part of the community.

Do you have a favorite game in the MOTHER series, and why? Do you have any favorite characters, songs, locations, or moments you want to share?

I’ve gotta stick with EarthBound as my favorite just because it was the thing that really brought me into the fold in the first place. I’ll cop to the fact that I’d never beaten MOTHER until a year-and-a-half ago. As someone who was a founder of the online community for EarthBound, it’s a little bit shameful for me, but it was really fun playing through it. I love MOTHER 3, and I know it best in terms of inside-out because [Fangamer] did work on the handbook, so I felt most familiar with it. But, over the 11 years since we did the handbook, I’ve forgotten so much of that game, so I’m looking forward to experiencing MOTHER 3 for the first time again sometime soon! The tank in MOTHER was a great moment. For EarthBound, I would have to say the thing that’s most visceral for me, the Giygas Battle. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed playing that at night, beating the game for the first time, and when the music kicked in, I was like, “Aaaah!” It hit me so hard, it was an intense moment. For MOTHER 3, I would say one of my favorite parts is Osohe Castle because it was so weird, and it feels like a separate game that they had tied in as this vestigial limb inside of MOTHER 3.

You’ve probably told this story a few times before, but for anyone that might not know, how was Starmen.net founded?

Basically, there were three sites from my perspective. Well, four if you count the first site I made that had one page about EarthBound. The rest of my website got deleted, so I went all in with my EarthBound page. I turned that into a website called “You Are Now Earth Bound.” I had an ancient scanner I used to scan images from the [EarthBound] manual and Player’s Guide onto my computer to upload on my website. That website lasted until 1998, and this was around the time that “Tomato,” Clyde Mandelin, reached out. We had been collaborating on a couple things. We started working on our first petition together for MOTHER on Game Boy Color. That ended up getting posted on IGN back in the day, and that was a huge deal. EarthBound.net started around this time by an outside person called “Buzz Buzz,” who came to me and said, “We’re gonna make a big, central website about EarthBound.” He referred to it as the “EarthBound Movement.” We started working on it and it didn’t get very far at all. Then Clyde came along and said, “We could make something really cool if you listen to me,” and luckily I did. It was entirely his effort, and I brought a lot of the existing community, but Clyde had this vision different from Buzz Buzz that was feasible and good. Clyde’s vision of EarthBound.net was very close to what Starmen.net is today. After a dispute about the domain name, we had a poll about the new website’s name, and we landed on Starmen.net for better or worse.

What was your main role on the site after Starmen.net was founded? What kinds of projects did you work on that really stand out to you now?

I had a lot of roles over the years. The way it generally worked out was that I ended up in charge of community stuff. My goal was to maintain the health of the community and push for community initiatives that kept people interested and engaged. Clyde was much more focused on the technical side of things like building the site and making sure it ran, checking analytics, checking how we could archive things better, and making sure we presented them in an easy, searchable way. Like I said before, I did a lot with the actual design, I stayed involved in putting together the look and feel of the website – I didn’t approach it with a vision in mind – but I made it as I went. In retrospect, that was really cool that the drive to run this website taught me a vocation, I just figured it out, I had to. I’m not teaching myself design, but solving those problems that designers solve taught me how to be a designer. I think that kind of passion can only come from something like EarthBound for me personally, and I think it’s like that for a lot of people in the community. They find something like that in their lives that is so exciting to them, especially when they’re young and have endless amounts of time, that it inspires them to learn to do things they wanna do for the rest of their lives.

How was the experience of actually watching the site grow and meeting so many other MOTHER fans? Are there any particularly fun memories you can recall when you first met more fans?

When we had our first convention, there were five of us, including me, and now the people that were there are my wife, my brother-in-law, the CEO of Fangamer Japan, and an investor in Fangamer if that gives you a sense of what crazy connections we didn’t realize were forming in that moment. It’s hard to describe the emotions I had in those times – you don’t think about the future in those moments – but how would knowing that information have changed things now? Getting to meet people really brought the community closer together, and those conventions grew every year from 12 to 20 to 50-60 people. I didn’t want to put a cap on it because it was so fun to meet other people who have this common interest – we were all EarthBound fans.

There were so many events run on the forums that had a lot of standout submissions over the years. Were there any really neat standouts in particular that you remember now?

The main way I remember things is visually, so I remember fan art submissions specifically. In 2002 during a Halloween Funfest, someone named Katie submitted this incredible fanart of a Crested Booka holding a lantern. Every time we got a piece of fanart that was approaching professional level, it was a big event. Everyone gathers around it like “Holy crap!” That happened on a regular basis and I loved it, it was one of my favorite things. One artist in particular stood out named Shawn Witt, and we contacted them when we were working on the EarthBound Anthology. The art they had done prior to that was so sparse, but so high quality, that they were the first person we thought of when we were deciding who should make the cover of this book that was gonna sum up the entire community’s aspirations for the past decade. So, Shawn put together this illustration for the book, and it’s probably one of my favorite art pieces of all time just because it meant so much to me then and because, even today, it’s still so incredibly good.

How was the wait for MOTHER 3? Was seeing MOTHER 64 come and go disappointing, and how did the community at Starmen.net react to MOTHER 64 and the wait for MOTHER 3?

The EarthBound community’s reputation for being long suffering really forged after that (laughs). I very distinctly remember EarthBound 64 was teased and talked about, it was in Nintendo Power as “Coming Soon,” and, very slowly, it dawned on us that maybe this wasn’t necessarily a done deal. That dawning realization that this was not happening, that realization about what was going on when the bomb dropped and we heard about the cancellation, I believe it was in the middle of our petition, the EarthBound 64 petition. We were worried that they were going to cancel it already, so we started this petition proactively, and then, right in the middle of it, the news hit. In retrospect, it was too little too late, we couldn’t move the needle on Nintendo cancelling an incredibly expensive project like that, it was just not in our hands. The cancellation was devastating, but it was also kind of vital to the community because it provided this opportunity to all focus on this game. So, that was an experience that was formational because it set the stage for what we would do in the future as fans that have a rough history, but keep trying to persist and make it happen. Even if it doesn’t happen, we’ll work with the scraps of what we’ve got. I think that really helped shape our attitudes and our approach to stuff in a much more healthy way, and it became our problem to ensure our continued existence. We’re not going to get this outside validation, so we’ll have to provide it ourselves. I’m glad that MOTHER 3 ultimately came out, but even if it didn’t, I think the community would have survived because in that period, we really learned how to do things ourselves. The fact that we were so primed to make our own entertainment, our own arts, and our own music prepared us for what we ended up doing with the fan translation and going into Fangamer, which was also borne out of that do-it-yourself thing.

Was it a natural progression to move on from Starmen.net and focus more on Fangamer? When Fangamer was first conceptualized, what were your initial goals in creating it? Did those goals change over time?

My own internal thought process on it changed over time, but, initially, Fangamer was built to support Starmen.net. At the time, I was a freelance web designer, and I was not making ends meet. I had just enough work coming in to cover rent, but I was going into debt. Because I was between jobs so often, I would just spend my time working on Starmen.net, partly because I didn’t have more important stuff to do, but also because there was some really interesting, exciting stuff happening at the time like the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation, EarthBound on the Virtual Console, the Do-It-Yourself Devotion, the Anthology… All of these projects were happening constantly, and a lot of them were things I started because I was really feeling strongly about this and the community wanted to see it happen. I realized, “Gosh, I’m spending so much of my time on this site and I can’t afford food.” (laughs) That was basically where I was at. I was like “I want to find a way to make this healthier and make it sustainable for me” because I knew I couldn’t keep it up, and it was really irresponsible. My wife Camille was a member of the community as well and she understood and begrudged my involvement in the community, but I knew “this can’t last much longer.” I didn’t want to have to step away from the site again and I started to staff about the possibility of finding a way to make it self-sustaining and actually support a staff with payroll. That was like many things at the time like, “isn’t that a stretch?” But it made me want to do it even more, like, I love stupid challenges like that, and so I decided to go for it. That was how Fangamer started.

The goal was to take what we were doing for EarthBound and help establish communities like that for other games like Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG, and of course to improve the community that already existed. That was the first iteration of Fangamer, and that’s why the forum software that you see when you go to the Starmen.net Forums is a lot more advanced than the site itself. That’s because, for the Starmen.net that you see for the site now, a lot of other folks and I built that in 2003. But, the forum is actually something my co-founder, Ryan, who goes “Brofish” in the community, and I built from scratch around 2008. So the forum was the first building block we were going to use to start these communities for other games. The goal was just to see what we could do with advertising like banner ads. We’d see if we could sell some ads and try and make that pay the bills and keep the lights on so that we could continue making software to establish wikis and big, meaty sites full of content to attract community for other games. We had the forum software running for 5 or 6 months and we flipped the switch to start putting out the banner ads. It turns out, you cannot make a living selling advertising. (laughs) At least, not in 2008, and I imagine it’s still equally impossible. We realized, “Aw crap, this is not gonna work. One person can’t make a living on this, much less two.” If Ryan and I could make a living off of this, we’d take it from there. That’s when we pivoted towards merchandise. So, John was another co-founder of Fangamer and for years he had run Starmen’s Cafe Press shop selling Starmen.net names and logos and EarthBound stuff. John had always maintained that and did an incredible job. He was always motivated to make fun, cool designs. So we worked with John to make a couple designs with the goal of buying us time to figure out what to do with Fangamer. It turns out, selling merchandise is a much, much better business objective than selling advertising. That was how Fangamer became a merchandise company: it was us pivoting away from banner ads and figuring out what to do next.

Do you still keep in contact with many of the Starmen.net veterans now that you work more on Fangamer? Have any approached you to work with Fangamer on new projects they’ve developed?

Yes, that happens all the time, and it’s great, I love it when it happens! Sometimes it happens out of the blue. Several times after I’ve been working with someone for years, they’ll be like, “Oh, by the way, I don’t know if you knew this, but I used to go on Starmen.net, or I used to be a huge EarthBound fan.” That happened in particular with the forum software. With the Fangamer forum software we built for Starmen.net, we ended up licensing it to ArenaNet for Guild Wars 1 and 2, and at the end of that project, we went to the launch party for Guild Wars 2, and we were just hanging out talking to the project lead. He was just like, “By the way, I don’t think I told you guys this, but I’m a huge EarthBound fan. I’m the guy that actually did the zero day for the MOTHER 3 rom. We basically all dropped to the ground and couldn’t speak! I was just so gobsmacked! I was like, “Why didn’t you tell us?!” We ended up talking for an hour about all the stuff this guy had done in the EarthBound community that for some reason he didn’t tell us about until we were finished launching this huge forum software. And like I said, that happens all the time. We just interviewed someone for Fangamer that lurked on Starmen.net for a big chunk of the 2000s. That kind of thing happens frequently. I’m really glad to hear that people had fun with what they did in or for the community back in the day.

There have been so many people from the Starmen.net community that have gone on to create their own successful projects, like Toby Fox and his games, UNDERTALE and DELTARUNE Chapter 1. As a part of Fangamer, how has it been to work with Toby on merchandise for his games?

It’s been really interesting because when Toby first came to us, I remember he gave me a heads up that he was going to be releasing a demo for his game. I remembered him releasing the Halloween Hack, so I was really excited to see what he would do in his own original property. I said “If you need help with the Kickstarter, let us know! We would love to fulfill whatever merchandise you need for the Kickstarter.” I figured we’d put out maybe a shirt or two shirts for the game when it eventually came out, and obviously you see how that went – just a worldwide phenomenon. Even to this day, we have never seen anything quite like that initial wave of demand from UNDERTALE. We’ve been involved in three of the five biggest video game Kickstarters in history, and still, in spite of that, the first wave of UNDERTALE demand just dwarfs everything. (laughs)

It’s weird to say because it’s UNDERTALE, it’s just Toby and his goofy sprites and stuff. Something very neat about Toby that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was how willing he was to focus on the core and the story – the stuff that people would really get pulled into deep, to the exclusion of the aesthetics. I remember when I first played UNDERTALE, I thought, “So, when are you going to replace some of this art?” “That’s final, man! That’s how it looks, that’s the game.” (laughs) In retrospect, I really appreciate that decision so much more because I recognize that Toby knew that it mattered a little bit how stuff looked, but, for the most part, the value of the game and the characters was in the writing and in the experience: the way that you interacted and the way they interacted with each other. It’s not about cool animations, great character design, or shading, or coloring, or any of that stuff. Knowing that Toby had the prescience to focus on that… he’s been well-positioned for the success he has had. He knows what to focus on. If Toby’s first instinct is to not do something, early on, we’d say “C’mon, what if we tried it like this?” But in the years since the game’s come out, we’ve realized Toby knows exactly what makes sense for his game, his community, and the merchandise he wants to see, so we’ve stopped pushing anything. If Toby wants to do it, we’ll do it, but otherwise, we won’t press anything.

How has it been to work with companies like Rare, Konami, SNK, and so many more on Fangamer merchandise? Have there been any other fun interactions with the companies you’ve worked with on Fangamer, or has it just been more about business than anything else?

It’s mostly business, which is a little disappointing to hear myself say. The conception of Nintendo from the EarthBound fan angle became this gigantic part of the EarthBound fan psyche – the idea of Nintendo as this behemoth out to destroy us. We all thought of Nintendo as this massive force that could sometimes be malevolent, sometimes hiding things from us, and we were trying to keep them honest by doing this or that. That’s been the most interesting aspect of Fangamer for me: learning about the industry and realizing the truth of the matter. A vast majority of people at Nintendo have no idea what EarthBound is and really don’t care either way. (laughs) And that’s true across companies. Most companies are filled with people who are just doing their job. It’s very rare to encounter someone that’s apart of a company who is there primarily because they are a huge fan. There’s a couple… Sega’s got some folks who do that stuff that are like community engagement. Nintendo has a couple of those, but it’s less of an overt thing and more of a fact of life. The Treehouse is comprised of people who really love games, love Nintendo, and, for that reason, in the Treehouse, you’ll find most of the people that reach out to a fan community and provide a little bit of information like guiding them this direction or that because they understand as fans themselves, and they really love the community to form up. Over the years, Starmen has had four or five contacts in the Treehouse who provided varying levels of information. For the most part, most of our correspondence has been “Gotta keep it brief, but I wanted to let you know this, or consider that, or don’t do this.” That’s pretty rare, that’s not common. If you’re working with Bandai Namco on something for Katamari, they’re not going to hook you up with their resident Katamari expert. The industry equivalent for that sort of thing is a producer. Especially as games age, the producer role changes and it gets handed off from the person who made the game because the studio got bought or they moved on to something else.

Have you ever tried speaking to Shigesato Itoi and the Hobonichi company about collaborations between Fangamer and Hobonichi for new MOTHER projects?

That remains to this day one of my overarching goals for the company. We’re gonna do EarthBound stuff someday, we’re gonna do something. Early on, that was the only goal. When Fangamer started and we switched from forum software to merchandise, it was really just EarthBound merchandise because the only fanbase we had to work with was the Starmen.net community. I actually emailed Nintendo right when we were starting up about getting officially licensed to make EarthBound merchandise and I got a one line response. It took a long time to get that person’s email address, but when I finally got their email address, they gave me a one line response, “We don’t license retro IPs. Good luck.” I took that as “good luck, have fun” and not “good luck, don’t get sued.” Over the years since then, obviously working on EarthBound stuff remained a goal, so we just had to make stuff we were comfortable selling that doesn’t infringe on intellectual property or copyright. By doing that, it really established the Fangamer ethic and the Fangamer design for things where we try to reference stuff and we try to evoke the feeling of a certain game instead of just putting the game’s logo on a shirt. So anyway, yeah, the goal has always been to do something, and that is something we’re still working on to this day. Who knows if and when it will finally come to fruition, but it’s always in the front of my mind. Can’t say much more beyond that, but still working on it.

Recently, Yasuhiro Nagata from the Hobonichi company asked if any manga artists are interested in MOTHER. Do you think this question will lead to more content for the series? What are your thoughts on the MOTHER series’ future?

I remember back when MOTHER 1+2 was announced, and that was a kind of bolt of lightning. That was the point I realized, “Wait a second, there’s this massive IP cache that Hobonichi has to work with. They could potentially keep doing this forever.” They were rereleasing this game on this new console and I thought they could do this for future consoles. Ever since then, that’s obviously been the case. They’ve been very careful with it and they’re very picky about how and when they do that stuff, but it’s clearly something they’re willing and able to do. For that reason, I think EarthBound and the series in general still has a lot of life left in it, which isn’t something that I necessarily felt back in the early 2000s. There was a lot of doom and gloom in the community. I can see that Itoi, partly because of the financial interest but especially because he has a personal connection to the games, thought ahead enough to maintain a stake in his creation so it doesn’t strictly belong to Nintendo or some third party publisher. For that reason, I’m optimistic that EarthBound is always going to be available in some form. These games will be accessible to future generations. As far as the stuff they’re doing now, we don’t have as many connections there as we used to. We used to have an easier time talking to Hobonichi and finding out what’s up, but we don’t really anymore. I don’t know of and I don’t expect there to be a big thing, like I definitely don’t expect a MOTHER 4. But, I think Itoi recognizes, especially after his contact with us and other members of the MOTHER community, I think he recognizes the spirit of keeping the games alive, even if it’s through something as simple as a Techo cover.

Thank you very much for your time! Where can people find you and Fangamer on social media if they’d like to follow your projects? And is there anything you’d like the MOTHER community to know as a closing statement?

Well, Fangamer’s easy enough to find. I’m on Twitter as well @reidman. I don’t have a whole lot to say and I don’t always have such a tight focus on EarthBound stuff, so be prepared! Apologies for that. For parting words, I just want to convey my gratefulness… For how happy I am that this is still going. Like I said before, there was this constant idea that the community itself was doomed and that it had this very limited timespan – that there was no way people were still going to be talking about EarthBound after a couple years. I really want to encourage people to give their hearts to this game and this community because it’s really worth it. I can’t say that about a lot of games, that they’re worth giving a lot of your time and energy to, but the EarthBound community is one I can heartily endorse. I appreciate all the stuff you guys have done in keeping that spirit alive! It’s very beautiful to me! Thank you.