When Nintendo Power introduced the author of EarthBound to American players in June 1995, it had to explain who he was. “You may not have heard the name Shigesato Itoi (pronounced E-Toy) before,” it began, “but his face is familiar to millions of Japanese TV viewers.” Itoi was not a game developer. He was an advertising copywriter, a magazine columnist and a television presenter who had fallen in love with Super Mario Bros. and decided to write a role-playing game set in ordinary towns rather than a fantasy kingdom.
Fast facts
- Born: 1948, in Gunma Prefecture, Japan.
- Careers: advertising copywriter, essayist and columnist, television presenter, game designer; since 1998, head of Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun (“Almost Daily Itoi Newspaper”).
- Games: Mother (Famicom, 1989), Mother 2 (Super Famicom, 1994; EarthBound in America, 1995), Mother 3 (Game Boy Advance, 2006).
- Developers: Ape in Tokyo, with HAL Laboratory on Mother 2 and Mother 3.
Copywriter and presenter
Itoi began as a copywriter for Seibu, one of Japan’s big department store groups. His television advertisements won awards, and one of the best known starred Woody Allen in a non-speaking role. Nintendo Power compared his magazine column to the American humorist Dave Barry. On television he hosted a sports news programme, and as a devoted fan of the Giants baseball team he promised to shave his head if they lost the Japan Series. They lost, and he shaved it on air. He also led a televised hunt for treasure in the old gold mines of Mount Akagi. He found nothing, but the mine turned up again in EarthBound, in the Dusty Dunes Desert.
How Mother began
Itoi told Nintendo Power that his interest in games began when he fell for Super Mario Bros., though he admitted he was not very good at it. He preferred role-playing games, he joked, because they were “the only kind of game you can put down when you want to get something to eat or go to the bathroom. You can even drop it for months, then come back to the game and keep going.”
He visited Nintendo in Kyoto, met Shigeru Miyamoto, and proposed an RPG that did not rely on fantasy or science fiction. “I wanted to create a game with real characters — characters whom players would recognize in the people around them.” Nintendo’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, approved the project, and Itoi took it to Ape, a Tokyo company best known for books about video games. “I didn’t want to create a game by the numbers,” he said. “Instead of putting the game in a fantasy setting, I wanted to use ordinary places.” The first Mother came out on the Famicom in 1989. An English version was prepared but never released at the time.
Mother 2 and EarthBound
The sequel stalled. Itoi later recalled asking Satoru Iwata, then at HAL Laboratory, to look at it: “If we use what you’ve got now, it’ll take two years to fix. If we start from scratch, we can get this done in six months.” They started again, rebuilt it in about six months and spent six more polishing it. Mother 2 came out on the Super Famicom in 1994, and Nintendo released it in America as EarthBound in 1995, with a player’s guide containing scratch-and-sniff cards.
Its America was borrowed from television. Growing up, Itoi said, his family watched American shows such as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver: “That was our picture of America… I love to think of America as a place like that.” Some of it was closer to home. The hero, Ness, regularly phones his mother and a father he never sees, a detail Edge reported Itoi took from his own childhood.
Mother 3
Mother 3 was announced for the Nintendo 64 and its 64DD disk drive, made by HAL with Itoi’s team. In 1997 N64 Magazine described a game of twelve chapters, set no longer in small-town America but across medieval, fantasy and science-fiction worlds, and called Itoi “the archetypal mad genius”. Two years later Edge reported it only half finished. In August 2000, in a discussion published on Itoi’s website, Itoi, Iwata and Miyamoto announced that development had been stopped. Iwata explained that the project had run for six years across the Super Famicom, the 64DD and the Nintendo 64, and that finishing it would take too much from Nintendo’s other games.
It came back on the Game Boy Advance, in 2D, developed by Brownie Brown with HAL, and was released in Japan on 20 April 2006, with a limited-edition Game Boy Micro to go with it. Neither Mother 3 nor the 2003 Mother 1+2 compilation was released in the West at the time, although Edge noted that English scripts for the first two games already existed.
Hobonichi
In June 1998 Itoi started a website, Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun, which he has updated every day since and which grew into a company, Hobonichi, best known for its Hobonichi Techo diaries. In 2019 Hobonichi collected Iwata’s interviews and writings in a book, published in English in 2021 as Ask Iwata.
Sources
- Nintendo Power, issue 73, June 1995, pp. 11–19: “Shigesato Itoi” (interview and profile: Seibu, Woody Allen, Dave Barry, the Giants, Mount Akagi, Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto, Yamauchi, Ape, American television, the scratch-and-sniff guide).
- N64 Magazine, issue 3, June 1997, and issue 6, September 1997: Mother 3 for the 64DD (HAL and Itoi’s Ape team, twelve chapters).
- Edge, autumn 1999 (issue 77): Mother 3 about half complete.
- Retro Gamer, issue 23, 2006: Mother 3 release date of 20 April and the Game Boy Micro.
- Edge, issue 163, June 2006: Mother 3 review (the English Mother cartridge, the Mother 1+2 scripts, Ness’s father).
- Shigesato Itoi, “Shigesato Itoi Visits Arino Kacho’s Challenge Room”, Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun, 17 September 2019 (web): Iwata and Mother 2. https://www.1101.com/gccxmother/en/2019-09-17.html
- Shigesato Itoi, Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto, discussion of the cancellation of Mother 3, Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun, August 2000 (web, Japanese). https://www.1101.com/nintendo/nin13/nin13_2.htm
- Lion Corporation, interview with Shigesato Itoi, October 2022 (web, Japanese): born 1948 in Gunma; the website started in June 1998. https://www.lion.co.jp/ja/newsroom/news/2022/4075
- Wikipedia, “Shigesato Itoi” and “Mother 3” (web, secondary): birth date and place; release dates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigesato_Itoi