What is your background with the MOTHER series? Where did you first discover the games?

In 1996, Jeffman got EarthBound for his birthday. It took him five or six years to beat it as he was quite young when receiving it. Winters was especially difficult for him to get through at the time, so he dropped it for a while out of frustration. Eventually, he grew more accustomed to the game’s mechanics and managed to endure through to the end!

You’re most well-known as the programmer on the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation. But before you began work on that project, where did you first gain interest in programming?

Preceding the Fan Translation by about four years, Jeffman began experimenting with programming as a teenager. He first began using Visual Basic 6, but really applied his eagerness to learn with the PK Hack community. Around 2002, he challenged himself to create his own tools similar to PK Hack, and from there began creating his own unique tools from the skills he learned in recreating it. Once MOTHER 3 released in 2006, he was determined to contribute something meaningful to the community using everything he learned up to that point.

There were a few other MOTHER 3 Translation projects before yours and Tomato’s came to fruition. Were you involved with any of these?

Clyde, Neo Demiforce and Gideon Zhi began work on the “Do-It-Yourself Devotion” in November 2006, which Jeffman wasn’t involved with. Instead, he was involved with a separate effort called “mother3.org” which formed around the time the game came out. Unfortunately, the project didn’t get that far due to internal drama which weighed heavy on the team. Eventually, mother3.org was abandoned, but Jeffman was still determined to achieve his goal in helping bring the game to an English audience, so he approached Reid Young on the idea of combining his efforts and Tomato’s, and thankfully he agreed.

Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin is a pretty successful translator, involved with localizations like Kingdom Hearts II, Steins;Gate, and even anime like Dragon Ball for FUNimation Entertainment. How did you two meet? Do you still keep in touch to this day long after the release of the translation?

Before the project, Jeffman only knew Tomato through his presence on the Starmen.net forums. While they had brief interactions, they only developed a personal relationship when working together on the translation. This was all through message boards and other instant chats, as they didn’t get the chance to meet in person until Camp Fangamer in 2015! Jeffman commented on how tall he was, also appreciating the other people he finally had a chance to meet through the event.

If I recall, prior to the translation project there weren’t any reliable tools for hacking MOTHER 3. You developed many of the tools such as MOTHER 3 Funland which opened up the possibility for hacking the game. Where did you begin in creating these tools, and what were the difficulties in making them?

Talk about false advertising — because MOTHER 3 Funland isn’t fun at all! All of the tools used for the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation were created from scratch. Jeffman brought over his knowledge of how the text was stored in the game from the Mother3.org project, and created the Funland Program for Clyde. Its purpose was to navigate through all the game’s text and organize it. After the translation project, Jeffman continued to dive deeper into documenting the game, continuously developing new tools.

I’ve heard that many of the enemy names in the translation were provided by the community at Starmen.net, conjuring up clever puns such as “Slitherhen”. Were you involved with any of these names, or perhaps did you provide input elsewhere on the translation process itself?

While Jeffman truly admires the creative inspiration headed behind the actual translation itself, he unfortunately did not contribute any written material to it. His favourite localization is Fassad, which originally was “Yokuba” in the Japanese version. It receives mixed reactions initially, but Jeffman found it brilliant due its layered meaning.

When it came to the programming side of the translation, what was the most difficult barrier to overcome? Is there anything you feel that could perhaps still be improved in future patches?

One of the most challenging things was the game’s variable width font, which had to be created for the translation. Initially, with Mother3.org, they utilized the English font that was already in the game itself. Unfortunately, it proved to be cumbersome due to the large size of the letters, so a variable width font was created in order to properly fit each character on screen. Little did they know, each individual part of the game (menu screens, dialogue boxes, battle text) used different code, which Jeffman speculates may have each been done by different programmers. Due to this, the team had to create several VWFs! One anomaly that bothered the team was a text table they couldn’t access, which appeared to be a list of nouns and game mechanics. Late in the project, Jeffman was fiddling with loading menus, and noticed a gap with an unused number. He called the function with that unused number, opening up the unused memo screen! Thankfully, it was compatible with the VWFs they had already created, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered with it. The Fan Translation released with some bugs, which Jeffman later regretted. Famously, the naming menu at the beginning of the game lagging once you confirm your choices, which falls behind due to the CPU intensive VWF the team had created.

It’s been known Nintendo of America was aware of the fan translation, with some employees even voicing their support. Did you ever have an interaction personally from somebody within Nintendo, positive or negative?

Jeffman personally didn’t have any interactions with Nintendo of America personnel, but a couple days before the translation patch released, the team received a letter from somebody inside the industry. Someone on the team analyzed the headers to find that the message did not originate inside North America, possibly originating from within Japan. The sender, who remained anonymous, urged the team not to release the translation, claiming “they were stepping on people’s toes due to the quality of the translation, destroying any purpose for an original release.”

The MOTHER 3 ROM is a treasure trove of unused content, with many things still being discovered to this day. What sort of things did you personally come across while working on the project; did any of these give a lasting impression?

When Jeffman was ripping the PSI animations out of the ROM due to a request, he discovered a test animation of the Annoying Old Party Man pulsating on screen which he found hilarious. He also recalls discovering the unused Masked Man battle backgrounds, which made him wonder how much darker the earlier drafts could’ve been.

I’m sure your perspective on the game differs as Itoi does being a developer of the game. I know one thing you like to do is try to break the game in many creative ways, but do you ever go back and play MOTHER 3 as “the player”? What is your honest opinion of the game being one of the major contributors in the Fan Translation?

Surprisingly, Jeffman didn’t play through MOTHER 3 entirely until late in the project. He commends the game’s writing and animations, calling it a far more “emotional” game than EarthBound. Despite that, he feels EarthBound is more engaging due to his nostalgic connection with it, but finds MOTHER 3 lives up as an equal game to its predecessor nonetheless.

You’ve been helping on a MOTHER 1+2 Fan Translation for a number of years now. What is your involvement with that project?

Jeffman recalls he first began work on MOTHER 1+2 around twelve years ago when the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation was still in development. He didn’t begin working on it in earnest until he was in college, and realized it was going to be a much harder project than MOTHER 3 ever was. Every piece of the game requires a VWF, which challenged his wishes to dump EarthBound’s text into the MOTHER 2 portion of the game due to the different formatting. His solution was to develop a tool where anyone regardless of their programming knowledge could manually import text from EarthBound, and much to his surprise, many jumped on to the project. Eventually, all of EarthBound’s text was implemented into the game, allowing Jeffman to continue developing the VWFs, which he continues to work on to this day with his team. Currently, the translation is nearing completion, slowly but surely.

How does working with 1+2 compare to 3? Do you feel your experience with the 3 Fan Translation influenced your approach with this game?

There for sure was an influence between the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation and 1+2. Jeffman feels he applied many of the things he learned, and where to better spend his time going into this next project. In comparison to MOTHER 3, Jeffman found a way to compile C code into MOTHER 1+2 instead of creating an assembly code. Even though he feels he may have made some better choices with MOTHER 1+2, the game itself is still programmed haphazardly (an example being how the game rerenders text windows with every single frame) and proves to be a more difficult challenge.

What’s your everlasting memory with the MOTHER series? Whether it be a favourite moment, character, or quote?

The first time Jeffman beat EarthBound stands as his greatest memory related to the game themselves. Otherwise, Camp Fangamer also lives as a surreal, yet wonderful experience he’ll never forget.

What are your current projects? Do you aspire to one day pursue a job within the industry, if you haven’t already?

Aside from the MOTHER 1+2 project, Jeffman currently isn’t working on anything MOTHER-related. He would love to perhaps tackle a MOTHER Creepypasta hack in the future if he had the free time, finding it an intriguing way to culminate everything he has learned over the past couple decades. He has officially been working as a developer since 2016, after pursuing some internships that recognized his work on the Fan Translation.

Thank you very much for your time, Jeffman! Our last question is where can people find you on social media if they so wish to follow your future endeavours. Is there anything you’d like the MOTHER community to know as a closing statement?

You can reach Jeffman either through the MOTHER FOREVER Discord or his Twitter account (@Jeffman19).

“Thanks a lot for having me on here, really appreciate it as it’s fun to talk about this, and reminisce on the translation and the series. It’s really great to see that it’s still thriving. The community is still growing, there’s constantly new people getting introduced to the game, which I think is really amazing as it’s been out for a really long time now. Even MOTHER 3 has been out for 14 years almost; kinda crazy. The MOTHER community is one of the most passionate communities that I’ve been a part of, so thank you for revitalizing it. I’m looking forward to what’s coming in the future for MOTHER FOREVER, and good luck with the launch!”