On the Joy of Sharing Earthbound with Friends
My first encounter with Earthbound was a personal, almost private moment. I was wandering around a Blockbuster Video in my hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, searching for some Super NES media to help me through an otherwise potentially uneventful weekend, when the biggest, honkingest box on the shelf caught my eye. This was Earthbound. I'd read about it in Nintendo Power earlier that month, and I've even scratched (and sniffed!) the cards that came at the back of the magazine over and over again with reckless olfactory abandon. So this game, if only for seeming to be far more unconventional than most games I was used to, attracted my attention, and I rented it.
Little did I know how much of a crazy, engaging experience I was in for. Within days I'd made my way to Best Buy to purchase the game, disappointed that I'd have to start my work over from the beginning, but excited about the chance of leveling up more before I reached Titanic Ant in order to hand his butt to him even more soundly than before. I loved this game, and I was extremely eager to share it with my friends as soon as I could.
I believe that I first brought Earthbound over to my friend Kungyen's house. This was back in seventh grade. Kungyen and I walked more or less along the same path from where the bus dropped us off everyday, and I think that one day I decided to go home with him and show him the unbounded wonders of Earthbound. Kungyen, always a lover of the bizarre, strange and iconoclastic, fell in love with the game. Many of my other middle school friends were soon to follow, and as soon as I beat the game I had numerous requests to borrow it.
Earthbound made its way into my circle of friends easily and without problems, probably because all of my friends shared the wacky sort of humor that I had that made me love the game so much. I knew a few people, hardly good friends with whom I would play RPGs, who denounced Earthbound for having "crappy graphics." Of course, for us Earthbounders, even the game's simple yet creative graphics became one of the points we loved so much about it. My friend Kungyen developed such a strong tolerance for simple RPG graphics that he went on to tackle RPGs with worse graphics (and bad writing, to boot): he beat Final Fantasy Mystic Quest twice, and even somehow managed to play Tecmo Secret of the Stars for long enough to tell us about the horrible plot. Of course, he never found Earthbound's quirky spark in these other games, but I feel like it had a positive effect on him and my other friends by helping them think of video games and what we consider to be "good" in an entirely new way.
Earthbound even made it into our private jokes and lore. We drew Mr. Saturns and tried to learn to write in his alphabet. One of my friends tried to start his own cult centered around the color blue. "Boing!" even became a frequent exclamation of excitement. After Earthbound had made the rounds and two or three of my friends had whizzed through it, I got the game back and started up playing it again. I mostly played it by myself, but often I would invite friends over just to enjoy the brilliant script and the pure wackiness with which Earthbound was absolutely infused.
In many ways, Earthbound was an anti-game. It went against everything that we thought we knew about how video games are and could be. The graphics seemed like they had somehow been purposefully simplified to emphasize the fun gameplay and the hilarious script. Anachronism and breaking the fourth wall were rampant, and we appreciated it: Mr. T denouncing kidnappers and moles telling us how to attack enemies was something that we had always wanted in video games but never knew. This was also the first game that we'd ever seen that used the word "crap," which was somehow a very big deal, at the time. This game captured the attention of many of my friends as it did my own, and I was always glad to expose friends to it. Not everyone loved it, and it's not as if I used the game as a litmus test of friendship; I could understand how it might just not be the right sort of game for some of my friends. But playing Earthbound was truly a bonding experience for my gaming buddies and me, and even now playing the game can bring back those wonderful memories of sitting in friends' basements and laughing ourselves silly making fun of the Annoying Old Party Man and the New Age Retro Hippie.
My first encounter with Earthbound was a personal, almost private moment. I was wandering around a Blockbuster Video in my hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, searching for some Super NES media to help me through an otherwise potentially uneventful weekend, when the biggest, honkingest box on the shelf caught my eye. This was Earthbound. I'd read about it in Nintendo Power earlier that month, and I've even scratched (and sniffed!) the cards that came at the back of the magazine over and over again with reckless olfactory abandon. So this game, if only for seeming to be far more unconventional than most games I was used to, attracted my attention, and I rented it.
Little did I know how much of a crazy, engaging experience I was in for. Within days I'd made my way to Best Buy to purchase the game, disappointed that I'd have to start my work over from the beginning, but excited about the chance of leveling up more before I reached Titanic Ant in order to hand his butt to him even more soundly than before. I loved this game, and I was extremely eager to share it with my friends as soon as I could.
I believe that I first brought Earthbound over to my friend Kungyen's house. This was back in seventh grade. Kungyen and I walked more or less along the same path from where the bus dropped us off everyday, and I think that one day I decided to go home with him and show him the unbounded wonders of Earthbound. Kungyen, always a lover of the bizarre, strange and iconoclastic, fell in love with the game. Many of my other middle school friends were soon to follow, and as soon as I beat the game I had numerous requests to borrow it.
Earthbound made its way into my circle of friends easily and without problems, probably because all of my friends shared the wacky sort of humor that I had that made me love the game so much. I knew a few people, hardly good friends with whom I would play RPGs, who denounced Earthbound for having "crappy graphics." Of course, for us Earthbounders, even the game's simple yet creative graphics became one of the points we loved so much about it. My friend Kungyen developed such a strong tolerance for simple RPG graphics that he went on to tackle RPGs with worse graphics (and bad writing, to boot): he beat Final Fantasy Mystic Quest twice, and even somehow managed to play Tecmo Secret of the Stars for long enough to tell us about the horrible plot. Of course, he never found Earthbound's quirky spark in these other games, but I feel like it had a positive effect on him and my other friends by helping them think of video games and what we consider to be "good" in an entirely new way.
Earthbound even made it into our private jokes and lore. We drew Mr. Saturns and tried to learn to write in his alphabet. One of my friends tried to start his own cult centered around the color blue. "Boing!" even became a frequent exclamation of excitement. After Earthbound had made the rounds and two or three of my friends had whizzed through it, I got the game back and started up playing it again. I mostly played it by myself, but often I would invite friends over just to enjoy the brilliant script and the pure wackiness with which Earthbound was absolutely infused.
In many ways, Earthbound was an anti-game. It went against everything that we thought we knew about how video games are and could be. The graphics seemed like they had somehow been purposefully simplified to emphasize the fun gameplay and the hilarious script. Anachronism and breaking the fourth wall were rampant, and we appreciated it: Mr. T denouncing kidnappers and moles telling us how to attack enemies was something that we had always wanted in video games but never knew. This was also the first game that we'd ever seen that used the word "crap," which was somehow a very big deal, at the time. This game captured the attention of many of my friends as it did my own, and I was always glad to expose friends to it. Not everyone loved it, and it's not as if I used the game as a litmus test of friendship; I could understand how it might just not be the right sort of game for some of my friends. But playing Earthbound was truly a bonding experience for my gaming buddies and me, and even now playing the game can bring back those wonderful memories of sitting in friends' basements and laughing ourselves silly making fun of the Annoying Old Party Man and the New Age Retro Hippie.
