Retronauts - 699: 30 Years of EarthBound

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Good Giygas, EarthBound is 30 years old!? Yes, and because we gave this cult SNES RPG the standard Retronauts treatment nearly a decade ago, this time around, we'll be taking a slightly different approach. To celebrate three decades of EarthBound greatness, on this follow-up episode we're digging into the fandom behind the game, and the communities that rose in the wake of its unceremonious 1995 launch. So this week, join Bob Mackey, Reid Young, Charlie Verdin, and Everdraed (all of Fangamer) as the crew looks back on the dusty message boards of the past and the modest empires that grew from them. You'll never look at a fuzzy pickle the same way again! Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 100+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This week on Retronauts, we're celebrating 20 years of not getting Mother 3. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie, And this week we are talking about Earthbound, an obscure little RPG that's come up a few times on Retronauts. So we last covered it 10 years ago, back on episode 69 of this new run. And now it's Episode 699, and Earthbound is actually Earthbound has just turned 30 years old, so enough time has passed to give this little game a few people care about another look.

And this time around, I have guessed, who built their life around this game even more than me. They've built an empire on Earthbound. And they even made a little documentary about it. We'll cover that soon. Before I go on any further, who is here with me today on this sequel to our original Earthbound podcast? Well, my name is Reid Young. I am the co-founder of Starman.net's and Fan Gamer.

And I believe, Reed, you were on our Pax 2020 live show. We were covering TV games. You were our pinch-in-uproval. That's right. Yeah, it was fun to get to be part of that. And thankfully, you had notes because I was not prepared. You just have to watch the footage of Elf. master system game and just say whatever comes to your mind it's very easy that's right and that's

what i did uh i got some mash references in there too it was good uh and who else do we have today uh i am charlie verdun i am also a member of fan gamer uh one of the founders and a person who has frequently played earthbound to raise money for charity awesome that's my little claim to fame and this is your first time at retronatch charlie if i'm not mistaken yes i don't think i've been on this particular podcast i have been on several other podcasts to talk about earthbound We don't need to plug those. I refuse to plug any other podcast. It's not mine.

But thank you. Welcome to the show, Charlie. And who else do we have today? Hey, it's me Everdread. I think I am coming back. It's been a little while, but I was here on the Grim Fandango cast you did, which was a great time. Excited to be here. So I'm Everdraed.

If it's not obvious, my name, well, it might be less obvious to people, but it's an actual reference to Earthbound. And my life has been horrendously corrupted and twisted by the realities of Earthbound. So it's a pleasure to be here and kind of talk about all this stuff as it's kind of impacted us all. I have met you in person. And before I met you, I did envision you as the little clay figurine. Oh, yeah. The mustache and the hat. One of my greatest regrets is that I don't, I didn't, as a kid, I hoped I would grow up and look just like Everdread.

But then there's issues where it just didn't work out. And it's not like, I could do a really good Everdread costume. But I, I'm just, I am a different. I am not exactly. I'm Everdraed. So there's a different. I'm misspelled Everdread in Misspelled Tucson with a lot of strange coincidences and veering-offs

is the way to look at it. Potential Halloween costume for the next fan game or Halloween party. That could be another goal. We actually, I am trying to get us to do, because it's like the end of, like, it's time for us to do the big earthbound Halloween. I want us to do it.

And I will be the best ever dread. You can, I will do it whatever it takes to make that, to be delivered. Jumping off the roof, anything. And he's also the first to die So it's like There's some things like how to be avoided He's like the one character in Earthbound

That does pass away So it's like I don't know If you can turn the fangamer space into moonside I will consider coming back to America For the Halloween party That's so good I didn't even think about doing a moonside Oh

Reed A bunch of A bunch of neon That does pretty accurately describe the fangamer office During the Halloween party though That is pretty accurate We're already You just need that in 40 seconds

of moonside music on a loop just to drive everyone insane and you need fire hydrants to just annihilate people and you're just like weeping from their difficulty you will not be able to use the office again but it might be worth it anyhow

welcome to the podcast everybody and I want to note to listeners that we already covered the production of the game and the game itself in 2016 so I'm going to put less emphasis on that this time around and focus a little more

on the community the game fostered in North America which led to the creation of things like Starmen.net And Fan Gamer, of course, all these folks here with me today are part of Fan Gamer, and I guess full disclosure, my wife also works for Fan Gamer. Full disclosure, they're a great company. Give them money.

That's me speaking with no bias at all. I was a fan of fan gamer before I met my wife and before I even met Reed. So I've always loved their stuff. And I'll be doing a little show and tell here just for the sake of everyone on video to show some of the ancient fan gamer relics I've acquired over the years. So before we go on any further today, I want to know everyone's general history with with Earthbound. I'll give mine very briefly after everyone else goes. I've already talked about my experience, but we'll talk about just the formation of the website and the company and

everything, but I just want kind of the brief overview of Earthbound in your life. If you can sum it up in a minute, if that's possible. So let's start with Reed. You and Earthbound, where does it start? We all know where it went. Yeah. I mean, it started like probably most Earthbound fans, just 13-year-old saw a fart joke and a Nintendo Power. I was like, hell yeah, let's go. So I picked up the game. And this was right about the time that I was like really getting into computers and learning about, I built my own computer and then I learned about making websites. And so my first website was just, you know, oh, here, I scanned my players guide. I scanned the cover of my players guide. And I, you know, like pulled out the logo and stuff

like that. And that site let me to meet other fans, which ultimately led to Starman. Notnet, which led to FanGamer is basically the short version. Yeah, part of this episode will also be nostalgia for old websites, and I was feeling very wistful pulling up the Starman.comen. Yeah. Does not work at all with the modern browser, but I could get a feel of like what used to be.

Yeah, you get a sense of it. Let's move on to Charlie. What is your experience with Earth, but I assume we're going to all have a similar kind of tale to tell? Yeah. In my case, we had a, me and my friends would every weekend, we'd go to the local video store, rent some stuff. We saw this big earthbound box and rented it and stayed up all night playing it, even though none of us had much experience with RPGs at the time, so we didn't really get the gist of like, you know, you fight things and you become stronger

so that you can fight bigger things. No, we just ran away all the time and it made the game extremely challenging. So we ended up just spending a lot of time just kind of dinking around Onet and just really getting a feel for that town and its people and nothing else. But eventually we did end up

re-renting the game several times, which is a fraught experience because every time you rent it, you just hope that your save file still exists. And that's how I largely played it. Yeah. Played through the game and eventually we got access to the internet. And I found a community there through the classic

Finding of a website's technique of you type in a thing that you like and then you put dot com after it And then whenever that doesn't work you put dot net in afterwards instead and that's That's how I ended up on earthbound that net. Yeah, I don't know what happens today, but that was a very formative part of my early internet experience. You just type in the thing you like like into a search engine or type in thing i like dot com and hope to god it's not some kind of pornography site that set up shop there i mean there was an era where they really weren't and then there was an era where they really were like a kind of the shift over it was like a very formative time so yeah my i was seven years old and i went to a rental video game store and i saw the giant box and i'm like oh i got to get this this is awesome and they gave me the manual which like back

in the day they would never give you the actual guide or manual anything they always scan it so they scanned it in like little strips, the entire players. The whole thing. So imagine like the, the entire thing. Imagine the thickest possible wallet-sized chunk of paper. They hand this to me. I'm like, oh, my God. What do I need to know about this game?

Because it's like, the player's guide is ridiculous. That's why the box is so big. So I bring it in. And I'm one of those guys that like, how you said like, oh, you got to be careful about your saves. I would load other people's saves. I never started from the start of a game event saves. I wanted to see, like, so the farthest in,

the one that was the highest level was a level 17 dude who got to Tucson. He was down in the bus stop save and I was like, wow, this is weird. And I had no introduction. It was like completely, it's like I never really played an RPG of any extent at that point. So it was like being thrown into the deep end of like, I'm in Tucson. I'm walking around and fighting random dudes. And the very first poignant memory I have is Everdred jumping off his roof at me.

The guy had somehow skipped Bergland Park. They'd gone down the bus station safe, but that was like the first, like I just went up there by accident and he jumped at me. And I was like, holy crap. This is the coolest thing I've seen in a video game. He's stealing my hamburgers. This guy rocks. And literally that one experience to find like, that's the guy I want to be.

I want to be like, I want to be like this dude that he ends up being very easy. Like you beat me, fair and square. It's cool. We got to sort this out. I was like, wow, he has it together. That Everdread is great. So that was a really formative experience to me that it then became like an internet identity. It took me a little while.

That was before, you know, all the sites sort of stuff came up. Later I would join Starmen, then that would be, you know, but initially I was kind of a lurker and hesitant. But it really was that moment of like Earthbound is such an interesting, intriguing experience. And like all the stuff that came from it kind of continued that vibe to me. And that's what it was like such a meaningful thing. Before I continue, I realize now I'm wearing a fan gamer hoodie. So this is not a fan gamer commercial, I swear. It sounds like it was somebody's job that day

Just to copy the entire Earthbound strategy guide And they really took their time I would have savored that day at work Absolutely It was someone must like they tried Like they could have been very lazy They could have just been the detour But it was everything

And it was like strips They were like trying to get these chunk Like they It was a crazy And I loved renting that sucker Just to look at that mail a bit Like I really wanted So I had to buy the game

I remember it being a pain to actually find it For whatever reason I was like trying to find this thing because I wanted to see what the actual manual was like. And so I still have a like completely ragged destroyed manual summer in my house. But that manual is such a big deal of like it's like formative in so many ways to me. I don't know if we'll get, we'll go back to it. But like that was a driver of like what the intent of the game was on the English side. It was like English only that manual. And it had so many weird photoshops, collages, integrations, these sort of like in world

artifacts and the clay models, that manual was such a huge deal creatively for me. And I know a lot of people at FanGamer. So I just like, that's an important thing to think about. We'll get into it. Actually, when we get to the handbook, we'll have a whole section on it effectively of what it'll be wrapped back in. But that's that memory of like the, just the, not even the real one, the best someone could do with that manual copying it, that was what sparked me into this. Well, my story, I know it's very similar to Reeds because I watched Reed's story play out in the documentary we'll be talking about. But like Reed, I believe, Reed, you were learning about the game through Nintendo Power's

Epic Corner or Epic Center, the RPG section of the magazine. Is that correct? Right. Yeah, I think it was Epic Center, and there was definitely one Nintendo Power that had the Scratch and Sniff, like, coupon. I'm pretty sure it was a Scratch and Sniff coupon, and that's what hooked me. But, yeah, I was reading about coverage and Nintendo Power. I was seeing the inserts in, like, GamePro and Game Players of the Scratch and Sniff inserts,

and I already liked RPGs. They were the only games I would buy because I knew they would take me a very long time and my income was very limited. So I was not going to play a five-hour action game. I would rent that and buy a 30-to-40-hour RPG. And I bought it day one in the very loose way you could reserve games back then.

I remember the first night, I played up till Threed, the town of Threed. And my family was going to go out for a swim and they invited me out. And I said, no, I have to keep playing this. But then I was out of crossroads. like do I want to finish this game too early or do I want to keep playing

it? So I had to decide I'm going to shut the game off now and kind of savor this experience. I was enjoying it so much. And then I would go on to replay it over and over again. I would discover earthbound.net, soon to be starmen.net. I was really mostly a lurker, but I would always follow

the events and all the news and Clyde's mother to Earthbound translation project or localization examination. And currently, behind me, is my original box of Earthbound looking over and blessing every podcast that I do. Now that I have a podcast studio, I finally took my original Earthbound box out of storage to put on display. It's something I had to sell so many things just to make it as a writer and as a

podcaster. But that is the one thing I never got rid of and I'm happy that it's still here in my home today. Good on you. Yeah. That's one of my big regrets is that like, you know, when I was a kid, like, I would get a game immediately chuck all the packaging and like just keep only the game itself. I didn't want anything else. But I did keep my copy of the book. So this thing there's like pages falling out of it. Like it's just a... Yeah.

Yeah, I have mine. Mine is in the box and what I did with Earthbound was I was so into it. I was pushing it on friends who didn't play RPGs. I lent to at least two or three people, which I never did with my games. I was very selfish with my video games because I was fastidious. They took too good of care of everything

because I had very few game cartridges. But I would lend my friends the game and the guide. As a result of that, the guide is just as beat up as yours and has things spilled on it, but it's got a lot of character because of that. And I do respect that, but I'm just afraid to open it again and have everything just kind of fall out into my lap. I remember, I remember I had my, the big box, we had it on a high shelf. And it was maybe like six or seven years after we got it. My mom finally said, can we just throw this away? And I let her do it. And it made me so sad in hindsight of like, I have like three, I think three, like loose cartridges in a plastic tub of

earthbound back at my home that I've like it's like it's so weird to think that these are a pricey thing these are commodity in a sense for people nowadays and it's like this is just I wanted to have these save games I just wanted more save games for the soccer I mean I could just think of all of the if there was a rare game that existed I probably owned it and that was released in the past 30 years and it's now not in my position anymore that is the one thing I refuse apart with I would sell blood before I would sell my earthbound box and cart which is on display too So I'm just so proud that I kept that. The game obviously means a lot to me.

And if you've been following my work over the years, you've seen it pop up in my writing, and I've podcasted a lot about the games. But now it's time to revisit it. And I wanted to check in just to see what's been new in the earthbound world since we last did an episode on this in July of 2016. And yes, new things can actually happen to very old games.

So I want to just talk about what's transpired in the last decade. And I want to just talk about what's transpired in the last decade. And I want to focus on the fan gamer stuff. We could talk more about it in detail later. But you folks have done a lot in the past. 10 years with Earthbound. So number one, we have the release of Clyde Mandelan's very comprehensive Legends of Localization volume on the game. Clyde was on our podcast,

I believe like in 2015, 2014 to talk about his Legends of Localization book for Zelda. This one is, it's seemingly like three times the size, just a super comprehensive document. A lot of it is based on some of the work he did in the past. Reed's holding it up on camera right now. But there's a ton of new

information in it. It's like an essential tome if you want to understand Earthbound. the writing of the game and how the localization, why it's so good. I made a little promo video for that. Tomato did such an incredible job of just there is so much, I mean, always historically, back in the day of Stermin-Net and being in his tomato like IRC channel, he would always be pulling out these like little tidbits of like he was somebody that could see what was going on on the mother two side, what was going over on Japan and just he would kind of bring it over

to us and kind of give explanations about stuff. And Tomato, like, that was like, I'm not going to say like a magnum opus. in a general, like for Earthbound, for that particular space of his, that is a magnum opus of looking at all these weird details that are impossible for an American, for someone that isn't immersed in Japanese culture and understanding to even possibly understand to get anything of it. And he did such an exhaustively cool job. It's, if you like Earthbound, check out that book. It is so, it is the best toilet reading imaginable. It has great snippets. I think I spent like six months

not on the toilet but not constantly on the toilet I'm just going through that sucker and it is so delightful your legs will fall asleep if you read on the toilet unfortunately If you let yourself you gotta say you have to say

this is the segment that I'm going to do and you know just do that because you're absolutely right Again this is not a commercial for fan gamer products although I want you to buy them but I have my own copy and it's fantastic

and I'm actually waiting for my next playthrough of the game I'm doing it this month for the 30th anniversary to play through it. I'm going to be using this Clyde's book and also the Earthbound Handbook, which is a fan gamer essentially doing a

spiritual sequel to the original strategy guy. Can you folks talk about that? Because I'm not sure if it's as known to people as the Legend of Localization book or the Mother 3 book. Yeah, I think the Earthbound Handbook was kind of baked in from the beginning.

Like, the very first product that Fangammer ever really worked on was the Mother 3 handbook. And that's because, like, one of the things that really spun fangamer out and made it a separate entity from Starman.net was the Mother 3 fan translation. And so, as we were working on the fan translation, I remember, I think Camille, my wife was talking to me. She's like, it's such a shame that, like, people will finally get to play this game, but they won't get the players guide experience that we got from Earthbound when we were young. And so I was like, well, I mean, we've got a lot of talented friends. Like, we could do it.

we can make our own players guide and we're like can we do that and so like I reached out to a lawyer I just asked I asked I learned way too much about copyright law and eventually decided that like you know what this is a risk that's worth

taking and so we made a player's guide basically you know like the the mother three players guide and after we did that it was so much fun and we learned so much that like we said like all right obviously we can never like replace the original earthbound players guide.

It's got so much charm. It's like, it's really funny. It's weird. It's just, it's kind of amazing that it exists in some ways. But it's also like, it's not comprehensive. And it,

you know, it is, it is very much a, like a, I wouldn't say like a marketing thing, but it's like, it's something that's there to, you know, it's there to, you know, as a fun way to help people get into the game, you know, to supplement the game. But we want something a little bit more

comprehensive. And so we decided to do it with the Earthbound Handbook, which is, you know, kind of like our Martha 3 Handbook, a similar take, except that we wanted to be a little bit more, I don't know, I guess, I guess like one of the things we were trying to do was to really enhance the sensation of playing Earthbound because we had played it so many times in our lives at that point. We wanted to kind of take, take that a little bit further and help people like see some of the depth that you can, you know, you can experience from the game after you've played it like a dozen times. And so that's kind of the goal of the Earthbound Handbook.

Like, you know, beginners can certainly use it, but it's really something we made for fans who are playing the game again. I can say so much about that handbook. That was actually the first major fan gamer project that I supported. I worked on. And that was actually, I think, why I joined FanGamer. Like, that pulled me into as a full-time employee. So that book is such a love letter to all the feelings and experiences of getting that

original guide of essentially the original earthbound guide it is a so much of it is in-world like accounts retellings newspapers from the different towns there are expressions of like extra information that doesn't exist in the game really there's just these little moments that help express give more content and depth to it so our goal is to go even further with that and show more of the in-world like this is a real place these are real locations this is real experiences that people had in this world from the game and just going on another level. So I made all these photoshopps of like, you know, this is, if this actually existed, this real footstep, giant footstep in this hill and you can oversee on it and like trying

to be accurate to how the game looks. It's pouring in so hard of trying to be like, this is taking it to another realm of verisimilitude in a sense. Because again, like that handbook was why I gone to Photoshop to begin with. There's like, I'm going to, we had so much. many people. So I want to mention, so Dan Moore did tremendous writing on the book. He keeping an incredibly good, like varied tone throughout of these, all these disparate sources that are combining together to make this book a whole. And then Audrey Wainer, an incredible designer and book, put her together, formulate, so much overarching logistics work going into it. It was a huge, sprawling project. I was only a small part, mostly Photoshop's and giving some content

encouragement and like inclusions there but it was it is such a lovely and there's so many little references that if you are an insane earthbound fan i literally there's like photos there's stock images from the original guide that i always like that's stuck in my mind there's literally a few of them that were able to get the rights for and include again so they're like embedded these little it just there is so much there if you like earthbound and want to have that replay experience you will love that i will tell you right now yeah i'm looking forward to giving that a deep dive when i do my big play-through again this summer. But I flip through it, it's a gorgeous tome,

and I like how Nintendo is not reprinting that old player's guide, and it's nice that they made it available online. With the Wii you release, you can kind of look it up on your game pad, but obviously not the same. You kind of need the tactile, physical thing in your hands to really replicate what it was like to have had that experience in the 90s. And other things that I've been going on, so you folks had a Kickstarter in, I believe, 2014 for a documentary

that recently released, can you talk about that? That's available on a lot of digital platforms, too. So you don't necessarily need to buy the physical version if you're looking for a way to rent it or get it digitally. I mean, I should point out that that Kickstarter was for the earthbound handbook. And Earthbound USA was, I don't know, almost kind of a stretch goal. It was a separate product where the handbook was the centerpiece

and then there was a bunch of other earthbound things. It was just our Earthbound We love this game And we hope you do too Here's a bunch of stuff about it Kickstarter And yeah

The Earthbound USA was just the The longest tale Of the Of that whole Kickstarter process In a way This podcast is kind of like The preview version of that documentary

Because we'll be talking about A lot of the things That are contained with the documentary Of course Documentary will give you a bigger picture Of the fan community The Rise of Fan Gamer All of your stories

and everything like that. Yeah, Earthbound USA was, it was something that we, I mean, it was kind of on a, it wasn't on a whim, but it was like, well, it was amazing, like, Jazzy, you know,

who was, who was the director of Earthbound USA. You know, she was just really constantly amazed, like, it's unbelievable what has happened because of this game. And like, even the circumstances around,

surrounding the game itself are amazing. But then all the things that have happened as a result of that game, or just like, you know, certainly to us, you know, because especially because we're in the middle of it, it's amazing. But, you know, I would, over the years, we would tell, you know, business partners or family members or whatever, they would ask, like, they'd ask me how I met my wife. And I'd be like, well, all right, it was, I made a website about a video game that I liked. And so, you know, after telling enough people about that and just getting these, like,

really shocked expressions, like, wait, you did, you what? Jazzy wanted to just kind of, you know, to do something with that. And so the documentary, honestly, I can't even remember how exactly it started out. But it took, there were so many iterations between like where we began and where it ended. And where it ended was really like Jazzy's goal was to just kind of follow the humanity and just like the story of the people who were involved in, you know, just like, who. were affected by this game. And so, you know, she ended up focusing on myself and Clyde are kind of two of the characters. But, you know, so much of what is included in the documentary is inspired by or just directly

from, you know, stories of people who were involved in the community. And it was so hard to get, like, you would not believe the size of the cutting room floor for the Earthbound. There's so much that never made the cut there. Um, and some of that is actually the interview that we got to have with, uh, Itoy himself, the creator of Earthbound. Um, we, we got lucky and we managed to reach out and, um, fly out to Japan and interview him. Uh, and that was actually very early in the process. We actually did the interview. Um, I don't think it, I don't think it happened before it like it was, I think it was after the Kickstarter, but it wasn't long after the Kickstarter. So we interviewed Itoy in like 2014 or maybe 2015 at the very latest. I do want to ask a bit more about that later because there's some things I'm dying to know about that experience. Yeah. So, you know, we kind of started with that as like the core of this thing at the very beginning.

And then we're like, okay, well, how do we tell a story that like leads up to this that really gives us the emotional impact? Certainly the impact that it had on us. And so, yeah, again, there was probably, there was a million different cuts of the documentary. You know, Steve, who also, Fangammer co-founder, Starmin.comer, starry, guy. also my brother-in-law, he spent years of his life editing and just like putting together. And really, he's responsible for the documentary being as accurate as it is in terms of like how the websites looked and functioned. Like, he's the reason that when, you know, you see somebody in the documentary pulling up Starman.comnet, it takes, you know, like five seconds to load and the images are slowly, you know, unpixelating. He did a lot of research and he did a lot of like video magic in order to make that stuff work.

Hey, I was right there with him, Reid. He definitely did more than I did. I remember making some of those templates for those, like, loading pages stuff too. So it was really interesting how there is a, there's websites will kind of let you re-experience the internet in some ways in like different old OSs. So that could be,

that was great for starting up templates or things like that. But there is so much research that we all kind of went into it with. But there is so much stuff that even on the editing level, we're like, you try not to, you try not to do any complex editing like super early in the game. If you're still going to make sweeping cuts, that's but there is a lot of editing that did in fact not make it into the end including like

some little like motion comic sort of stuff there's there's some neat stuff to it and Steve did an incredible job of like I remember I spent like a few months working on like edits for this and I was like I can't do this anymore it's too much for I this is over like this is I can't I'm not you know Steve please save me here and he did save me and it's it was something that was like I really appreciate it because it's it's one of those things that it it's a really surprisingly edited there's a lot of like um reacted dramatized shots that are like surprisingly well done and it feels like actual footage and that's both the um the compositional sort of work and like uh filming and live action sort of effort that went into it but also the editing on top

of it a lot of effort went into it i think one of my fears because i i joined into it maybe a few years, I wasn't there the entire 10 years, so I didn't see some of the earliest stuff. But I know I had this worry when I did come in that it was like, is this going to be kind of dry? Is this going to be very game focused? Is this going to be something that like YouTubers have kind of already done? And Jazzy did a tremendous job of focusing, not just on like relationships and community, because that's in its own sense. Like if you're too drilled down, then it's like almost too specific to work. It generalizes out to sort of the vibes you get from all early internet communities, a lot of people who see this documentary, they're like, oh, that's just like

my neopets forum experience. That's a lot like, oh, when I was on the Mega Man forums, I had people just like that. There's, it, they were able to bridge it into something that is more universal for early internet, which isn't the largest audience, but it's something that is more than just, you know, it's not just for earthbounders, it's not just for that. It's about seeing these sort of little vignettes of how people engaged with the internet when it was like it was back in the early 2000s and that's like I've never seen a done effect like certainly not effective but I don't think really at all by anybody out there and it's just it's kind of like I was blown away by where they ended up because I was kind of prepared to be like well there's a lot of ways where you can go

wrong with a there's a lot of ways but it was really well navigated so I've always been impressed by I will say and I promise this is going somewhere I watched the uh the documentary trekkies last night and it made me think of the earthbound USA documentary and that they're very different audiences They're very different kinds of media. But both documentaries do capture that 90s experience of how vital it was to find a community, how difficult it was at times, but how meaningful that made it. Now we are too connected. But in the past, you would seek out these little groups, the anime clubs, forums, websites like starmen.

And you would find your group. And I think that's like a key experience for a ton of millennials, just like, There's nobody like me around me. How do I find people like me? You go online and that's where you find your people. Yeah. And to some degree, I think it's just a real shame that we don't have communities as insular as that anymore. Because I think that being in such a small community, you can find a place that's distinct for you in a way that you can't really, whenever it's, everything is just full blast, social media, everybody sees everything.

it's harder to find your own identity, I think, in that world, which is, yeah, I think that's why we were able to create FanGamer in the way that it was, was because we did find our identities there. We knew what we were good at, and, yeah, we formed those relationships in a way that I don't think a lot of people are able to do, or maybe I'm just being an old man waving at the You have to think like Discord, right? So Discord is sort of, forums don't exist as they did. And there's a lot of specifics to forums where they're, they're not just private

and insular, they are discoverable. There's a lot of private discords where people have small communities and they get together, but they're a lot harder to find in instances. And they're also not like permanent records. You're kind of expecting it to not be looked back upon while forums were these weird sort of permanent repository of like these are the weird fanfix that people work together to put like these are the weird creative Photoshop threads and spiraled off. and you can always go back and revisit them.

There's this weird sort of the way that people engage with communication and like interacting with others. Discord is, you know, that's kind of like the heritage of both forums and IRC combined together and also like vocal stuff. And like, but it's all,

it's more like IRC where it's like kind of, you're not expecting people to come through it. If people are coming through it, they're trying to find dirt or something weird. While forums are just like, it's a different experience. It's sad. It's sad to see those die off for the most part and then to be replaced.

They were the biggest things. that forums had was that they created senses of identity. The idea that like you were proud because of like you were a good poster instead of like a really atrocious one. And like this was you have made a bunch of really funny content on this forum. You have done these stuff with other people. And it's like permanently there and you have to be mindful of it. It's very easy to post complete garbage and then be surprised by how you know in the future people will find it. Like there'll be some way that it gets out. And forums were kind of like you learn that rule very early. Do not post complete garbage that people will find out, because it will come back to you.

I mean, we'll cover more earthbound stuff in a second, but I totally agree. As someone who feels very old, like you, Mike Charlie, I feel like the rules we all learn from being on message boards are not being used anywhere else. And I'm just thinking, you're asking something you could Google. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? You would have been banned for this in any insane message board, but yet you're continuing this behavior. But again, maybe that's just we grew up in a different ecosystem. there.

I do want to cover a few more of the other Earthbound-related things that have been happening in the past 10 years. So, Nintendo released Earthbound and Earthbound beginnings to Switch's Netflix-style virtual console service in February of 2022. I assume these are going to be carried over to Switch 2, unless

they're going to be cruel about it. I don't think so, but who knows? I just assume that those services will remain intact and the games will remain playable. We're recording this before the launch of the Switch 2, so we're not sure yet. Other things that have happened, This is very recent.

There was an interview between the creator of mother, Shigasato Itoi, and the localizer, Marcus Lindblum, that was thankfully translated to English, and you can read that online. It's always nice, even if it feels like this is one of those things where you can never find out anything new, but there are still, like, new little tiny nuggets of information, like why Porky was renamed Poki, the way he worked his daughter's name into the localization, his daughter was born. He arrived in Tokyo for his interview the day of the Omshin Riccio Seren Gas Attack. things like that, just these very, very interesting stories that I had not heard until this point. And there's a, you know, a shout out I should make here is that that interview happened because of Starmen member and Fang Amor C-O-O, Lindsay Moore. She actually, she moonlights for Ito's company, Hobanichi, and she does a lot of translation, localization work for them.

And we knew Marcus because we had reached out to him for the documentary. like he was interviewed he's part of the documentary and at some point it came up that like Marcus had not yet met Etoy and we're like we've got to fix that and so you know long story shorts I don't remember who

how the connections got made but Etoy was on a very rare trip to America to see a Dodgers game and I can tell you that part because I was there for this interview because another podcast was interviewing Etoy and I was there for that like last year

around the like during the um the secrets of mother two event in Tokyo um and after that interview he mentioned oh by the way i'm going to be in uh los angeles like next month uh is there anything you know should should we set something up or something uh like not quite realizing how huge of a place america is so like you can't just like set something up real quick in a month for uh so um the people i were with were like I don't know. Well, we'll get back with you. So I got back to Lindsay afterwards.

It's like, hey, do you know about him coming over? And she's like, oh, dang, we should set something up. And that's how, that's, yeah, then they bounced around the idea. And he ended up meeting Marcus. Yeah, that would seem to be, at least it was translated fairly recently. I think April was when the translation of that went live. Well, my only complaint about Hobanichi, the ETOE's company, is not enough things are localized, including this book, the Secrets of Mother 2. Oh, man.

So my wife flew in Japanese. I was like, could you flip through this and let me know if anything interesting comes out of it? And it is just so dense. I realized, well, that was a very unfair thing to ask her. So I quickly rescinded my request. But I would kill. So Mother 2 had its 30th anniversary in Japan in 2024. I happened to be there.

I missed the big exhibit where they were putting the clay figurines on display. I was able to participate in the loss in lottery and went a few kind of trivial things, even though I invested $70 into that lottery. but my only name drop I will do on this podcast is the creator of Game Center CX we visited his office and he found out I like Earthbound he just gave me this copy

so thank you producer Khan for handing this over to me unfortunately I cannot read it and I can barely speak with him without translating through my wife but yes one of these days there's got to be a translation of this book but so much has come out of the 30th anniversary there's so much merch

it seems like I'm not sure if you guys would agree with me is there more merch for mother than ever before It seemed like, oh, they released the Mr. Saturn thing here and maybe like a nest thing there. But now it just... We were so thirsty back in the day on the English side to get anything whatsoever. We would make her own... I mean, Reed's wife, Camille, makes the most amazing clays. And I was going back to like start...

We wanted that stuff to exist so badly and to even have access to it. You could see some of it over on the JP side, but it was pretty rare. This was like stuff that happened. You could try to find vintage, not vintage, but like it came. out with a game. It was more around like the launch sort of stuff. But it was really hard to find. They did have more stuff in Japan, which was like comics and sort of derivative works that were like, they were like holy grails for us to try to find and see them at all on the English side. But nowadays, it's like you can be in America and order something from Hobo Nietzsche and you can get like plushes of the four.

It's like, my, it's like mind blowing. I would have gone crazy as a kid for this stuff. Yeah. And that's, it's a funny. dynamic to exist in because, you know, Fan Gamer, honestly, Fang Gamer was founded and started strictly because we just didn't have access to the kind of merchandise we desperately wanted as fans. And so we thought like, all right, well, we're going to make some stuff that's like, it's legally distinct. We're not going to say the name Earthbound or any of the character's names or anything. But we're just going to like make merchandise that kind of evokes how the game made us feel and like the things that we got excited about. And so to do that in a time when

basically nothing existed like all the all the merchandise was from the 90s and it was very expensive and nobody could afford it and so we started making our own you know like a unlicensed merchandise and once uh the mother project started up it was like oh man like i can't remember if mother project proper started up you know how how far into fan gamer's tenure but it was only a couple of years into fan gamer that we realized like all right we've got to stop like we can't we can't keep making this unlicensed stuff because they're starting to make stuff and that was the whole reason than we started. It's because it seemed like it was never going to happen. And so

because merchandise was starting to happen, we just kind of backed off. And that's one of those sad things. It's like, oh, man, I wish, like, people will often say, like, I wish Fangamber still made earthbound merch. It's like, we do too. But, like, you know, you've got access to it now. So, like, you don't have to be that sad.

Yeah, and thankfully, it's all owned by the creator. So you're giving money directly to ETOE in his company. Yeah, even Nintendo of America, deigned to release some other stuff. This is the one

thing I can think of. It's this, I have this phase distortor luggage tag on my mic arm. And that was

released through Nintendo or club Nintendo. It was like very, very limited. But just a very strange,

rare piece of item from Nintendo of America. So even they were kind of like dipping their toe in the world

of earthbound merch, as much as they kind of like to not call it too much attention to that game in the series.

So yes, we have a ton of mother merch. We have the 30th anniversary. There's also the official U.S.

release of Mother 3. Well, that didn't happen. We're all waiting for that. Who could have seen that one coming? Clyde Mandolin, aka Tomato, had what was called the Mother 3 timeline of hope on his Legends of Localization page. That has been not updated for a while, not since 2018.

But my question, just to check in with everybody here, as we're discussing Motherstuff in general, even though this is an earthbound podcast, what is the general feeling about this, this Mother 3? I feel like Nintendo only, released Earthbound on Wii U because the chips were down and they're like, we'll give you anything, just please. But Reed gave me a thumbs down and I'm kind of in agreement there. I mean, the 20th anniversary is coming up, who knows, but...

Charlie, I'm going to give you dibs on this one. I mean, look, to be an Earthbound fan is to forever be hopeful, a little bit of Polyana, you know? Exactly. Maybe someday, like, I understand that there's... so many ducks that need to be in a row before you can actually expect mother three to happen in an official capacity. But I mean, the future is such a huge place. Eventually, those ducks might end up in a row. I just don't know when that's going to be, and I'm not holding my breath

for it. I'll just be thrilled and pleasantly surprised whenever that happens. Yeah, it'll be nice to be surprised. If not, there are ways to play it. in English. So it's not like you can't have the experience. It'd just be nice if we they would acknowledge it and make it official. So other earthbound related things that have happened, this is news to me. You can now play the incredibly rare

mother two spin-off card dice game called Slot Brothers. This was released seemingly alongside Mother 2 in Japan. Incredibly rare piece of merge. People were able to track this down and now I believe it's playable through tabletop simulator, the steam program. You can find it that way. But

yeah, one of the few mother two products that was a playable game. Yeah, it was wild to see that. And it's so emblematic of like the community. And like, you know, the early spirit of starmen.net's

continuing to carry on. Like the fact that these folks dug up this extremely expensive, extremely hard to find game and so lovingly documented it and actually brought it into like digital space. You can actually play it even if you don't have a copy.

of it, like incredibly cool, hats off to them. I love Earthbound fans. I think you're the best people on Earth. I believe that is technically piracy, though. I just want to note. And that is the classic legacy of you do what you got to have these experiences. You want to see them for real. You want to see the official, but you do what you got. I feel like when you're printing out your own dice, the police will refuse to get involved. Whatever, whatever you're doing. But yeah, you can actually, you can play it virtually. They have the way to print out the cards and the dice online. So very, very cool. Like, yeah, the vibe I get, as being an earthbound fan,

it's a non-spiteful version of, you can't keep this from me. It's a more enthusiastic version of that. So I'm really glad that's available. This is news to me. A jokey thing I have here is that Reggie Fisemae is no longer president of Nintendo of America. He was in quotes, a super villain

when it came to the Mother 3 saga. Of course, it's more complicated than that, but he had some fun with making comments about Mother 3 and Earthbound in general. Well, and we, like, a world premiere factoid here, we reached out and we actually got a hold of Reggie to try to interview him for the documentary. And the response that he gave us was classic. I was like, perfect.

This is exactly what we expected. He said, this is not a topic that makes sense for me to continue commenting on. At this point, current Nintendo management in Japan and the U.S. are best position to address fans on this, and I hope they do. Good luck. So, there it is. It's a perfect corporate memo, I think. It really is.

That's from Reggie Fisomei principle of Reggie Fisemay Network LLC. It hurts more when there's no acknowledgement at all, right? Like if you don't get anything from people and they just say nothing, that really sucks. When they can joke about it and laugh about it, I always thought that it was like, oh, that's kind of charming there. Like, we get it. We're overbearing. We made a petition.

We sent out like how many 30,000 signatures out there. Like, you got to at least acknowledge it. If you're not going to do it, that's fine. We get it. But just acknowledge that people care, and it's something that don't snuff out hope by making it something that is completely enveloped in darkness and never talked about is always my sort of feeling. So I appreciate it, right, you a lot. And am I missing anything when it comes to new earthbound materials? One thing I just remembered, people track down the earthbound promotional ruler, which was a rarity for a very long time.

I think that happened within the past 10 years. Somebody bought it on eBay for like an insane amount of money. But it looked like you had something, Reid. There was, I learned about this through Starman.net because they are still updating it. But they, Nintendo allows you to get like icons for your Switch apparently. And just a couple months ago, like around Christmas, you were able to get, like, you had to spend platinum points or something. I've never actually spent Nintendo points except the one time to get them other music book. But I guess you could get icons for your Switch.

So another like super obscure, rare, like instance of Nintendo. America saying, all right, well, here's this tiniest possible morsel for an earthbound fan. Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out because I never click on that Nintendo Switch online icon on switch, but the one time I happened to do it, all the earthbound icons were for sale, and I bought

all of them. My current icon is the rambling mushroom, so I'm so happy that happened. I think they even did earthbound beginnings around the same time, too. I think so. There was another big event, I think, was about a year ago now, but the music of Mother. They played it. It was a live,

streaming event where they had the musicians out there and playing all the tracks with like live visuals and like psychedelics and video drug sort of stuff going on. So I actually I helped make a little video. Toby had a really heartfelt message for that. It was only like all of it was in Japanese. There was a long interview with some of the people involved in the musicians. So really it was like you could enjoy it. Obviously the music as an English speaker, but it was hard to really get a whole lot out of all the rest of it without knowing Japanese.

But that was a really cool live event. It seems like they're going to be maybe doing more. I am not certain about that, but it's, you know, the idea that the music especially, this sort of lasting heritage of what went into the Earthbound's music and the entire mother series of music,

that is something that is still super remembered and loved over in Japan. And certainly out here as well, but they're still having like a live concert. That was so much effort going. It was really cool to say. Technically, I mean, I was watching it digitally, I think, with Toby, just kind of commenting on it. It was like, this is insane to see this go down.

It just, it's like pure nostalgia of the music being played back live. It's lovely. Yeah, and in terms of music, too, in the last 10 years, I think people have figured out every sample they've used in Earthbound's music. I watched a video a few weeks ago going into it thinking, I know all this. I just want to check in to make sure there's not any. anything new. And there are some new things in there. There's always more. They were using this set of TV

themes to fuel some of the samples. Like I think the Green Acres song is being sampled in one of the Earthbound songs. They have the Little Rascals. Yeah. Within the cafe. And it's like there is a lot of, I used to watch a lot at Nick at night. And so many of these things

that I just like, I unconsciously knew that they were memorable and I couldn't even place them back in the day. I'm like, oh, of course. When you see these videos of, like, how they're brought back, the sampling game was off the charts, kind of like singular, especially for Super Nintendo era, my goodness. Yeah, and I'm not sure what the legality is. I was looking into this because I have not played the virtual console versions of this game far enough to get where things are really heavily sampled.

But it looks like that aspect was not changed for the release. So they must have negotiated something or they must have said, well, this falls within fair use or we've only used so much of this song. I'm not sure what the logistics are behind that. they're tiny snippets and they're also heavily like they are it's something like I've always I do not know what it is I'd love to see if there's anything more to it but I've always assumed like they can get away with it and the sort of like it is such a tiny usage just because of the limitations of the game itself are very short snippets but yeah I'd love to I'd love to know what the law like what the conversations were about that internally that's like one of those things that nobody will ever find out especially for like you know a Japanese company but it's yeah yeah in terms of change is not to get too granular here, but I think if you're playing the online, Nintendo online versions,

they do, uh, they do, uh, kind of mass some effects to make them a little more friendly to people with epilepsy, things like that. But if the games feel largely untouched,

I was not able to find a list of changes or anything like that. Yeah, I think, boy, that's, that's the exact kind of thing that Clyde would have absolutely jumped on and been on like, zero hour, you know, back in the,

back in the, back in the heyday of Starman. But I'm not sure if anybody actually, went to the trouble to play through and document the changes. I'd be curious to hear. I assume Clyde would have been decompiling the code for all the changes. Comparing checksums and making sure

there's any additions just right there. I'm going to be able to be. ...tolde ... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

... Well, we talked about what's been going on with Earthbound for the past 10 years. I just want to give a brief interview, rather, of the game in case you're wondering, well, why is this so important? Or just to remind you of why it's so important in case you've forgotten. So Earthbound is the localization of a Japanese game called Mother 2. It was a sequel to the original mother, released for the Famicom. This was released in the USA in June of 95. This is one of many attempts by Nintendo of America

to make RPGs a huge sensation in the North America as they were in Japan. We saw things like the release of Final Fantasy was one of those. They were going to release the first mother as another push. I think illusion of Gaia, even though it was a Zelda-like, that was another like, can you please like RPGs kind of movement?

And then Earthbound. And then we have Super Mario RPG. So they keep trying to push RPGs on people. I love them. A lot of people weren't on board, but it took until Pokemon really to get Nintendo's audience on RPGs

and that was a phenomenon that wasn't just like oh we found a new market that was like this is now the biggest game ever so they kept going forward Earthbound was one of those tries and it didn't work

it really didn't work in the West I think the game is not like a mega super hit in Japan but it found its audience and it was successful enough to produce a sequel but this game sold very very poorly it was a new quantity

game magazines really panned it, which upset me as someone who loved the game and read every game magazine. I was like, what the hell are you thinking? But it did not fit the vibe of the 1995 game space at all. It was so outside of the expectations for

a cool video game. Well, the end era of the Super Nintendo, it was all about the graphic pushing that you could get on the Super Nintendo. So it was like, this is in the era of Chrono Tricker, Final Fantasy 6, of Supermar RPG soon after. It's like, well, Earthbound isn't measuring up compared to those and that's what you visually show like that's how you promote things you know have

your commercials your promos your screenshots it it really was a driver and it always kind of has been for video games but that was a really tough era where it was like what can you push out of this like what are they doing like what's there is a lot of impressive stuff on the super nintendo and visually earthbound nails it's aesthetic but it is kind of like charlie brown peanut style and that aesthetic does a lot for its overall themes and what you're getting out of the experience but it wasn't something that like reviewers that are trying to, you know, go to the gamer audience that was going to latch onto or necessarily acknowledge.

There was a few decently positive reviews, but they were very rare. Yeah, yeah, you would see a lot of reviews. And I was looking at a lot of these, in preparation for the podcast, ones I had read before, but you would see things like, well, it looks bad, and the humor is juvenile, and the combat is like Dragon Warrior,

which was what we call Dragon Quest at the time. And, you know, people wanted to see bleeding edge, pre-rendered graphics, polygonal graphics. They weren't used to games having a defined art style like this that was ignoring trends. Earthbound and Mother, they're kind of like, we're doing our own take on Americana. That's why all the characters look like characters from the Peanuts comic strip series. We're using these bright, bold colors. We're not going for, you know, the height of what the Super Nintendo can do. We want to evoke a vibe in a style. And that vibe worked

on a lot of people. A lot of other people saw it and said this game looks bad. This game stinks. Well, there was a fun tidbit that I actually got. I got to meet the game designer years ago in Japan. And it wasn't a very long meeting because I would have just talked to him forever. But one of the tidbits that I did get from him was that, you know, obviously Earthbound came, or Mother 2, and then Earthbound came out, didn't do super great. Certainly didn't meet the expectations. And so Yamiuchi apparently said, like, listen, Donkey Kong Country is huge.

every super nintendo game from now on basically has to be pre-rendered graphics until we get to the n64 and so the very first iteration of mother three was actually super nintendo pre-rendered 3d which was it floored me when i heard that was like man talk about like we thought we thought we were chasing the you know chasing the ultimate uh you know the ultimate macguffin and getting like earthbound 64 but there was an even earlier more primitive version of that i mean it likely would have been hideous, but I kind of want to live in that timeline just for a minute to see what it looked like, and I'm sure, with time

it could have been charming. Like they, Super Mario RPG nailed it. Blew that aesthetic out of the water. When you have talented people, they will make it work. And like, that could have been pretty impressive if you really think about it. They, I mean, it also could have been like Donkey Kong. And Donkey Kong is great, but it's a

very specific aesthetic that doesn't, it's a different vibe. It would have been really weird to see. Man, that's cool. And I guess to be a productive. No game looked like this. No game sounded like this. No game had writing or localization like this. Some games played like Dragon Warrior, but those were not very popular games. So this was a new experience to most people, this kind of turn-based combat with a few twists here and there, but keeping it fairly by the numbers. But it did not become a sensation, but the right people found it. And they would not stop talking about it. And I believe through emulation, that is really where it caught on because this game was on and off shelves very quickly. quickly. It didn't sell. It was put on clearance very quickly. You couldn't find it after that. It became a kind of a rare game in the 2000s. But thanks to emulation, throughout the late 90s, people were playing this game in huge numbers and in fueling the kind of fan communities that started like Starmen.net. And I mean, we'll talk more about the details of this, but these communities can become businesses. They can inspire people to make their own games. Like we mentioned Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale and Deltaeroon. And now we live in a world in which Delta Taroon can exist alongside Eldon Ring and no one's like, that game looks awful. Right.

It's for children. Don't be cruel to Eldon Ring, you know. It's a, it's a good one too. And Toby got started via Earthbound Romhacks. That's where Megalovania, the great video game song, now classic song, came from an Earthbound Halloween romhack. Well, that's one of the amazing things about, you know, video game communities and that, like, you know,

I assume, at least hope is still true of Discord communities and wherever else, you know, communities have been forming. since the social media diaspora. But like growing up on Starman.net, like we were so many people at the site were like honing skills that they would later

use to survive. These were like life skills that they were developing. And I mean, like 90% of Starment at Net's like output was just like art, writing, music and like fan games. It was basically just like, you know,

all the things that, you know, go into making a game. People were honing and practicing as kids on the internet, you know. And so many of them went on to make games. Like Toby is one of them, but there's so many others like Nick Popovich. He's the creator of Slime Rancher, an old starmin.net, you know, person. He runs that studio now. And they're like, we worked with arena nets and we met a bunch of earthbound fans who were, you know, who grew up on the site and they went on to become game developers. I mean, literally a couple of times a year. We will be working with someone in fan humor capacity, doing merchandise. And at the end of a meeting, they'll be like, by the way, like, how's Sturman.net doing? And I'll be like, what?

And sure enough, there's another earthbound fan, you know, who just, you know, we haven't talked for 20 years, but, you know, they, they were checked in back in the day. And, you know, and sometimes, sometimes it was earthbound specifically that inspired them to get into whatever it is they do now, whether that's art or writing or music. But even on top of that, there's also just like a whole extra layer, like beyond the actual creative, like, creation stuff. Just like, like, I learned to run a business or the kind of to run a business by running Starmina Net, like manage a community. I learned about marketing. Like we just had to like guerrilla marketing. We were just making it up as we went. But like I learned a lot in that process and a lot of the things that I learned doing just, you know, like being annoying like to Nintendo of America taught me a lot about like very useful skills for actually. running a business. Yeah, that's a great point. I feel like we are all from a generation where some of us had to go out and create our own

weird jobs because there was no other place for us in our passion where you folks went and did Starman and eventually Fan Gamer and people like me and others. They were like, all right, well, there are no websites anymore. I will create my own kind of platform to talk about things or to write about things. And it all comes from learning those skills from learning how to talk civilly to people about the things you love. and then creating things about the things you love, like writing and music and art

and even creating your own game. So, yeah, I really, I just keep going back to how vital those early fan communities were, and I wonder what people are doing without those. Well, it's tough because, I mean, there's absolutely the creative drive. That never dies off. It's a question of how easily do people find each other,

which I think in some ways is harder, but then, like, if you look at Undertale, there's a lot of ways you kind of connect how back in the day, startman.comnet, community forum and that was like that was a set piece that was a place where people glommed up together and did all this stuff that was visible and connected and all under the same umbrella and then with undertale there's a lot more like mini discords that are sprawling and there's like modding and there's a u's i'm not even going to the i don't know

them i can't even begin to describe them but they're these sprawling sort of sub communities that develop or people care about them and they do find each other it does still happen but it's it's a different game It's a different sort of, and, you know, you have the mods like Undertail Yellow. You have these really surprisingly in-depth sort of modding efforts. And I think more so than ever, I don't want to downplay because while we saw the burgeoning, the start of this stuff back in the day with Starminette in a lot of ways, what the modern internet does for modding and remix, absolutely mind-blowing. This was like, you know, the Silver Gunner sort of like going through hundreds and hundreds

of different remixes and all these, like a collective of people working together. it's it the internet does still have its silver linings it still has good aspects to it it isn't lost i don't want to be the old folk you're like the death of the irc's and forums and stuff like that but how the heck you find them i have no clue because i look for this stuff and i'm like i guess they randomly met up and like they i don't know it's it is a different space yeah yeah i think it's one of those things where you need the free time of a non-adult because i i love uh undertale and i love delta run but my experience is i play those games and then i really i really really like them. They're great games. And then I move on to

the next game. And I know I'm standing at the top of the iceberg and beneath me is all of the discussion, all of the fan art, all of the fan works, all of the role playing, just it's, and if I was like 12 when Undertale came out, I would probably be like at the bottom of the iceberg with everybody else. But

it's just my own experience is different. But I love that it is thriving in the same way that the Earthbound community was thriving 25 years ago. And that brings us to star men, So I wanted to focus on this aspect for the last third of the podcast. And we've touched up. on it briefly, of course, Starmen, formerly earthbound.net, was the roots of the fangamer

business. And I just want to ask everybody on here, I mean, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but Starman, what is it, what happened, what did it foster, what were the activities and events like? It seems like there was so much going on. And my experience was of a lurker and maybe being on for like, between like 99 to 2005-ish. That was kind of my time on the site. But I know I missed a whole lot, but I love being on there in the very beginning because it was the core community of online earthbound fans. Yeah, Starman really grew out of just like,

it was just a one-off site that I made, a very flat site. It's actually still archived, so you can still visit it. I think I archived it on Starman.net a long time ago, and it's still available through there. But, you know, a community grew there insofar as, like, I got a lot of emails

and I would like start posting, you know, things that people had sent me and just like crediting them in the email, And then it was like the most primitive possible message board in a way. People email me. I copy and paste it onto the website. And like people start talking back and forth to each other through that. And so that grew.

And like I, at some time around there, I learned about IRC. And it was like, oh, great, chat room. All right. I don't have to copy and paste stuff on my website anymore. I just tell people to come to IRC. Yeah, it became starmin.net. You know, it was Earthbound. net initially and then it became Starman.

dot net and it was basically a bunch of bored kids like we just we like I grew up on a farm in the middle of a cornfield and I was not big into farming and I did you know construction and farming were the two things that I you know my dad did and I helped out and I did that but I didn't love it like I would always try to get back to the computer I'd stay up until three four a.m. on school nights just working on starment dot net stuff because I was really excited about it and like I was part of a community that was doing something. And the thing that we were doing was partly just building up our own community, like making it bigger, but also we were starting to reach out and to get recognized by sites like IGN. And you're like, like Perr Schneider, you know, he's, he's a part of

the documentary. And it's kind of amazing that he still is where he is. He's been there the whole time. And he's able to go back and he's got these old, oh yeah, I got this binder of like these things from the late 90s. And here's, here's some mailbag questions. that you guys sent in, the Starmen sent in to IGN back then. And so, you know, we started getting recognized and acknowledged by, you know, like IGN. We ended up in Nintendo Power a couple times, a bunch of other gaming magazines, just by virtue of just being really excitable and having a lot of free time. So, you know, the height of that was really us, like, organizing and sending these petitions

to Nintendo specifically to say, like, we want more Earthbound, please. And one of the struggles in that process was just trying to keep it positive. And I think that's going to be a struggle for anything that involves more than a couple people is like, you know, not letting it become like bad or negative. And it certainly constantly trended that way. And we did our best to keep it out of the, not to gutter, but just like to keep it from being like angry. But it often ended up being angry. And that's probably one of the only regrets I have is like, I wish I could have kept this more generally positive and not like, you know, not like personal. agreement that like Nintendo is specifically

targeting me or us to not give us what we want yeah and that was the earthbound siege project well what year was that I you mentioned it it's basically a binary put together you're sending it out to Nintendo various websites like one up the site I would eventually

worked for just to kind of create awareness like we're here we want more earthbound and was this before or after the release of Mother 3 in Japan that was after so the the siege was actually specifically because like as Mother 3 was about to be released

like the game was announced that they were working on it we were all really excited but as it got closer to release the more pessimistic the whole community became about our chances of actually getting it in English and sure enough we didn't and it was pretty clear at some point that like it was just like

there was no point in like holding our breath and waiting it was just not going to happen and so that's when we decided to pursue the fan translation and thankfully I say we it was really Clyde. Like, Clyde was willing to do the fan translation. Basically, so his friends could play this game is kind of what it boils down to.

And so while he was doing that, we didn't, like, I mean, personally, I felt bad. I was like, well, I'm sitting on my hands here. Like, I don't know Japanese. I can't translate this game. I don't know ROM hacking. I can't help with that. What can I do? And so that thing was to, like, do everything I could to make sure that, like, we had done everything

that we could to get the game legit. legitimately. And so that took the form of what we called the Earthbound Siege. And again, it was just like tons of fan art, tons of music, tons of videos. Basically any way you could be creative and just like be loud about Earthbound. We encourage people to do. And at the end of it, we ended up like creating. This was one of the first like book projects that I ever did was like the Earthbound anthology. And we basically took all the all the fan art and everything and we just like made a bound copy of this incentive. to a bunch of like outlets like including one up um IGN I don't know how many other places we sent it um yeah it was it was a it was a incredibly sleepless summer because we did it in the span of like four months like we went from zero to having a bound book that we shipped you know to a bunch of media outlets so we're covering things pretty quickly here so the growth was from uh star men into fan gamer fan gamer correct me if I'm wrong existed initially to sell kind of off-brand

earthbound merch because there simply was none to be found. You eventually branched out after that, but it seems to me as an outsider the release of the translation or localization unofficial of Mother 3 was a transformative moment for fangamer

because we have the release of the official unofficial strategy guide, which is amazing, and also there was merch for a game that was being unofficially released. In fact, I had to dig this out, but I still have my Franklin badge keychain somehow was able to hold on to it since like 2008. But from an outsider, I think I had bought things before the Mother 3 translation, but suddenly you guys are getting a ton of attention there.

That's a key item. It's really hard to get rid of. So you've got to be careful. It's hefty. I mean, it's really kind of, it's actually inaccurate to say that fangamer started off as a merchandising company for Earthbound. stuff that was kind of incidental to the creation frankly uh like our or the initial goal for fan gamer was uh we we saw that you know we made starmen dot net it was this really cool community about earthbound could we make other communities like this for other things and we tried

but it turned out that that was also around the time that social media was really popping up and the demand for communities like this was just disappearing. And so we started selling shirts and stuff to keep the lights on, and it ended up being more than just keeping lights on. It became what we just had to do, period. Yeah, my memory is just the first things I purchased were earthbound T-shirts and pins and things. So that's just me. My own memory is informing your actual history.

But I do remember that when they became available, it was so exciting to me to be walking around in an earthbound shirt and thinking, nobody knows what this is. Just feeling very smug about it. That's like a 26-year-old. Yeah, we almost immediately, like after making the first few earthbound things, we're like, okay, well, what do we do next? What's our next favorite game? And the immediate consensus was chrono-jutor, I believe. And so we started doing that. And still with the idea of let's also make a Chrono Trigger community.

And you'll notice that there is no fangamer Chrono Trigger community. Do you remember the IRCs back in the day? Because there was Earthbound. That was like the aboveboard one. But then there was also CT for Chrono Trigger. That was the more out there and like, this is the teenagers' cool zone. Yeah, the bad boys of Starman.com. That was a fond memories of CT messages.

It's funny you mentioned Chrono Trigger because I feel like Chrono Trigger fans are more mistreated by Square Enix, then Earthbound fans are mistreated by Nintendo. It just, and it's a case of of square not owning the characters, which I think

they would do whatever they wanted with Krono if that was one of the characters they own. That just, it seems to be that simple. Yeah. Yeah, that's basically my, once a year,

I talk to our licensing director. I'm like, oh yeah, so when are we going to, what do we have to do to get a Krono trigger? Like, just remind me, oh, that's right. Yeah, we can't.

It's not going to happen. But I, every year, I remember and I try it again. So, so you're doing, a lot of things that are involving Nintendo properties in legal ways mind everybody. When

did Nintendo first become aware of you were there any concerns along the way when it came to kind of dealing in this what is considered a gray area by a lot of people? Well it was actually from the jump because I was so nervous about like I didn't

want to make any enemies and I didn't want to do anything that I felt was like morally wrong and so I emailed Nintendo like I I asked around, because of, you know, like, because of the circumstances of, like, the translation that we knew a couple people who worked at Nintendo. And so I asked them to get me an email address. If someone I could ask, like, hey, how do I get the license to make earthbound merchandise? And I sent an email, and the response I got back was like, it was like one line.

And it said, like, we don't license retro titles. Good luck. It's like, all right, I am, I'm going to take that as tacit and not endorse. but look the other way kind of situation. And so we went from there. And we never really had a problem with Nintendo. And I think that's because of the rules that we kind of set for ourselves to say, like, we will not, you know, we will not use trademark names.

We will not even use non-trademark names. Like we're not trying to. And another thing that we did was to look and see like, all right, well, what merchandise does exist? Like if a fan wants to buy something, can they buy stuff? And if they can, then we're not going to do it. or like we're not going to do that kind of stuff specifically and so that was true of you know chronotrigger like there was there was no merch of chrono trigger you were not going to find something for it

and so we felt we felt comfortable like you know making again you know chronotrigger inspired merchandise and then that ended up you know that's something that we got away from you know after you know five five-ish years of of business because we had started working on indie games and you know and then eventually we started working on like bigger bigger games and then AAA and it's kind of funny that that's kind of brought us back to focusing on indie games because those are really the most like those that's really where the juice is for us it's kind of funny you were talking about like delteroon and dark souls or uh elden ring and those are two two big licenses in our lineup but delteroon is the bigger license for us which is kind of wild and i should point out that uh i was just in japan not too long ago people in japan love uh deltourne and undertale like they they are also very intense about those games and I went to the fan gamer pop-up shop in Shibuya

and it's just full of Undertale merch Undertale the god I forget the name of the cookie The Tyaki? Thank you, thank you yes you get your own Taiyaki with Undertaker Oh did you see the front frame of that The like the fan gamer

They have like an animated front facing Billboards Yes we took a video of the entire animation. Awesome I made that I've been making them so update every time there's a new rotation of Taiyaki I'll put those in and do a little animation with them I love seeing like whenever people

I don't want to look at it myself but when other people like it enough that they want to record it it's like such a like yeah that is such a fist pump moment for me so I'm glad to hear you did that yeah I wanted to point that up because you have you've really expanded there is a fangamer Japan and obviously there's no bad blood

because you folks release games for Nintendo consoles so they're not they're not holding anything you've done in the past against you because there's no reason to but it's nice that there was never any hostile back and forth about what you were doing. Yeah, part of it was just obscurity. Like, you know, even though everything that we were doing was big for us and that, you know, we were seeing a lot of success, it was in such, it was a niche within a niche within a niche. That, like, you know, when I would approach people on Nintendo or, you know, much more rarely be approached by people of Nintendo,

they wouldn't know, they wouldn't know and they also wouldn't care. It's like, okay, Earthbound, I don't know, I don't know what Earthbound is. I'm sure it's fine. Anyway, let's talk about this, you know, publishing thing you guys want to do. So, you know, that was one of the things like when I was a kid and up until, you know, close to the time when we started getting more serious about, like, the fan translation and, you know, the petitions and everything, I just thought of Nintendo as like, all right, well, it's just this, like, it's this big company, everybody knows all the same stuff, and they're all going to give you the same answer. And, you know, it didn't take long for me to realize, like, oh, okay, Nintendo has thousands of employees, and none of them agree on anything. They all have their own personal opinions. You know, the company has its way of communicating with the outside world, but the complexities of a company, like a company that large are make it, make a lot of things possible that you might otherwise think or not possible.

And I want to go back to something we talked about earlier, something that I'm personally very interested in. Now, in the documentary Earth by USA, great documentary. Everyone, please watch it. You folks did get to meet Shigasato Itoi. And a part of that meeting is documented in the film. I'm just curious as to what that experience was like. And I know it was now 10 years ago. But I'm wondering if you could fill our audience in into what it's like to meet the creator of the mother series.

Charlie, you might have a better memory of this than I do. So I want to let you go first. Yeah, I think Reed was at the time part of the interview, like the back and forth and was probably pretty obsessed with that. I was behind the camera. So that was convenient for me. Just walking into the Hobonichi offices generally, you start to get a feel for who this guy is. What kind of a company does he run? And so, you know, you open this door, you go up the elevator, there's only one door outside of the elevator.

It opens up and there's just a gorilla sitting on the ground. Wait a minute. Is that the ape from ape? No, I think it's just some big random gorilla statue that he saw one time for sale on the internet and decided to buy it. better. So it's just in his office. And I'm pretty sure it's still, he's moved offices a few times since. Still there. Yeah. And so you just look around, you check out the artwork. There's some like original David Lynch pieces on the wall, which are wild. And you look at the spaces that like his employees are working at and how this whole place just feels very homey. The people

there seem very happy and just really into what they're doing. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's just like a really cool place, not what you usually imagine, I think, whenever you think of a Japanese office culture. It is, uh, you can tell that there's a warmth there, uh, that, that, uh, it doesn't fit the, the stereotype. Um, and so we got to meet him. He shows up, uh, at this little, this meeting room that he has this very traditional Japanese meeting room or we're all sitting down on tatami. And, you know, every time we have a question for him, you can tell, like, he takes a moment

and he thinks about his response. And then he gives something that just blows your mind a little bit every single time. It was wild to see. Like, he is as thoughtful of an interviewee, as you can imagine. I think a lot of that comes down to the fact that he is a copywriter. That is his job. His job is to take a complicated idea and make it into a simple phrase.

And yeah, clearly that's just the way he lives his life. But also at the time, it seemed like we were kind of blowing his mind a bit. Like he did not seem to realize like how big of an impact his work had had on people in the United States. And frankly, I don't think you really understood what an impact he had on the Japanese audiences either. Because eventually, like last year, you know, again, I went to the Secrets of Mother 3 event and, you know, then talked to him a bit afterwards. And it was clear that they did not think that that event was going to be as big as it was. It was sold out every day. There was a line to get in.

And it wasn't just like a bunch of, you know, 40-year-old dudes. coming into this place. A lot of them were just young kids who were just genuinely interested in this property. It continues to be influential and interesting to people. And I'm kind of getting away from the Itoi interview a bit. It all kind of comes together in that he's just, he's just an interesting person to speak with. And his work is impactful even, you know, decades later. And you can see why when he seems to be I mean I don't really follow him that much in his activities but it seems

from an outsider's perspective he really is embracing mother more than ever in terms of at least like here are things you can buy we're going to celebrate it more and it's not like he was ever dismissive about mother but it was one of the many things he was doing with his life and he is not a game designer he is a copywriter slash Japanese

celebrity who was like one day oh I want to make a video game I'll talk to my buddy Miyamoto we're going to team up and the way he wrote the games is very unique where he would just dictate funny lines to someone who would write them down. So this is just like a little sandbox he wanted to play in for little portions of his life. But I like that he is realizing like, oh, these kind of like little games I made that I had fun with and didn't think about again. They are like life-changing for some people.

People have really fallen in love with this series. And I'm happy to sell you all manner of plushes and planners and bookmarks and whatever you want. I can put the clay figures. I did not go to these Mother 3 exhibits, but I don't know where those figures were, but they're in immaculate condition. I was shocked. They're like artifacts.

They've kept really good characters. They're bigger than you think they are, too. They are not small little statues. I mean, they're like, yeah, they're gosh, at least six inches, maybe eight inches tall. Let's say you get that detail. They're like surprisingly detailed when you actually see them in the magazines.

Because we've had the Art of Nintendo Power Guy on our podcast and he is he's seeking out the artifacts of you know what where's this model that they photograph for this issue or where's the maniac mansion house they built for this photo spread and normally it's like a contractor

was hired to build it and it was so big they had to destroy it because there was just nowhere to put it but these things I feel like they're all like neatly packed into boxes and just put away for some future event they knew might be coming that's actually a question I've always had is if we have a running and I don't think we do the total account of like a lot

of every known clay that existed that was originally created like obviously there's ones in the magazines but I know they had some in their guides as well they had items they had stuff that was like representations that were more than any U.S. English speaking fan ever engaged with oh yeah I did also want to note that like

when he was actually making the games the experience of making Mother 2 and Mother 3 especially they seem to be exhausting for a toy like he mentions a lot where you know he wasn't able to see his daughter this is an experience that like really it took a lot out of him and I and he has this class sort of I am done with this. I'm not making Mother 4 like a very classic a dev who has gone through a very arduous birthing process. Usually it takes a few years for them to be able to

return back and say, well, I want to revisit this. I want to think about the joy that this game. But like in the moment, he seems so done from such an exhausting experience. And it's, it's lovely to see him reengaged. I mean, he is in his 70s now. So it makes sense he doesn't want to make a new video game. In fact, he's even said, you know, I love Mother, but if you want the game released in the West, I can't help you, so please stop contacting me about this in a very polite way. But yeah, he's a fascinating guy.

Without him, these games would not be as special as they are, because he is the creator. He is just fueling the weirdness and the uniqueness of all of these games. Before we leave, though, I'm just curious for all you folks on the podcast. What is your current relationship

with this game? Have you played it recently, or is it just this totemic thing that is omnipresent around you so you don't need to re-engage with the actual text anymore. I'm just curious as to your relationship with Earthbound currently. So for myself, I actually, the last time I played through it, or at least played it, was with my daughter when she was, she was probably like four. And I've been very nervous about like being overbearing about like, oh, well, these are the things that I liked when I was young. So guess what?

Now you have to like them too. So I've been pretty hands off on that. but she kept asking questions about like, well, what's the short little guy? You know, oh, that's Mr. Saturn. You know, she did, I've got plushes all over the house. And so, you know, she's like, well, what's he from? And so, you know, I would tell her, like, what's a video game that I liked? And so eventually we started playing it together.

And it was insanely sweet. And I will never forget, like, that opportunity. I got two more kids since then. So I'm waiting for them to ask me, like, hey, when can we play Earthbound? But I'm not going to push it. That's great. That's great. I never thought about that experience of just like, what does a modern child think of this and, you know, how do they engage with it?

Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of waiting for my kids to get a little older and more skilled at reading before I really introduced them to any RPGs. But, I mean, I still play, like, I mean, I don't remember once the last time I played Earthbound, but it was probably for some event or another. I know I played Earthbound Beginnings last year on my Switch. So still I think the one I played the least

is probably Mother 3. It's been a while for that one because that one's a little tougher to play very effectively because I don't really want to get a flash card and I don't understand Japanese well enough to play it on the Game Boy Advance.

But if you're not playing it Game Boy Advance, then you're kind of missing out on the battle, like, a lot of the battle system. Yeah, the timing is so hard on an emulator. Like, it just, it's a little bit off, and you really have to be precise with a lot of the songs from other three. But anything else, it's easy to just, you know, pop it open on the switch, just start playing through it. And Everdren, how about you? So I used to play it more than yearly. Then at a certain point, it kind of went down to every two or three. And then, like, I think maybe I played it middle of COVID, like, maybe, maybe two or three years ago now, it's about time for me to play through it again.

It's always a game that, like, no matter how many times I've played through it, there's so many, the big thing is incidental dialogues that are insanely well-crafted and memorable. Those are always, like, surprising. And sometimes you remember them. There's just like one guy who's like in Moonsai and he's forgetting who he's am is like, I am a forget, I am a forgetful man. I'm a forgetful what? Am I a man? And it's just like, like the weird, there's all these little, and obviously they had, they, they're not just the toyisms. They're also filtered through Limblum and there's all these sort of like tiny little moments of expressions within these characters and they like constantly run through

my head as far as like this is being able to to write like that and have these little vignettes almost of expressing ideas. That's a lovely thing that I, you know, so earthbound is baked into me so hard that there's just so many times I remember like lines and sprawling elements from it. But it's one of those things that I, when you do go back, there's always more there for you. And in a way, like, because of the relationship where there's a lot of references, there's a lot of connections over to Undertale. It's like always getting like re-brought up to where Undertail is a similar way where like wherever you are in your life, when you go back to these games, there's always something there that's kind of new and surprising for you when you

return to them. And that's, I think that's the hallmark of what a really good, memorable nostalgic but like lifelong game for a person can be so I and I like mother three even better mother three is one of those games that I think is so like it's a little bit more intense and direct about its theming and concepts that it you know it kind of beats you over the head with it but it's it's also it's it has the same sort of little memories and sort of like people dealing with these situations of like a world that's truly gone absurd on them that I think is maybe more poignant than ever given we've had some weird recent time it feels like modern living has only gotten weirder and weirder with what we're experiencing through it these are

games that are just they're it's insane to think that they exist at all in a lot of ways but they're they're always so poignant and lovely to see that they do exist and they can always come back so i got to play i got to play i got to play through all of my final statement is i'm a i'm a big stinking hypocrite because i have honestly not played through earthbound in 20 years. Every time it comes out on virtual console, I'll play through an hour of it, but it's just like, oh, it's so special.

I need to set aside time to replay it. And up until that point, I played this game maybe like 20 times through. Like the summer it released, I think I played it through six times because it's like a 30-hour game and I was a 13-year-old boy with no job. So very achievable.

But like, in the time since 2005, the last time I replayed it, I've just been learning so much about it. And yeah, this is going to be the year when I replay it with Clyde's book, with the fan gamer, new earthbound guide next to me. I wanted to be like a very rich experience and like weirdly enough, the last time I replayed it was 2005 and I was getting back into writing after taking a break and I was

writing unofficially for my one-up.com blog and I was doing kind of like a let's play as I was playing through the game again. And that is honestly what got me back into writing and kind of kicked off this phase of my writing career and in video game career, which is still ongoing. So I feel like Earthbound has done so much for all of us. on this podcast. Yeah, that's beautiful. And the fact that you, you know,

you've got the opportunity now to go back after 20 years on the 30th anniversary. It's just like, oh, man, perfect. You got to take advantage of that. Grab that star.

I'm going to have the box next to me on the couch, my arm around it. I won't go that far. I won't go that far. If only because I don't want the box getting damaged anymore. Right.

But that is it for this celebration of the 30th anniversary of Earthbound and a celebration of fan gamer as well. Just learning about more about the community, where fangamer came from, and how closely connected

everyone on this podcast is with the game. Before I plug anything and talk about retronauts, let's go around the horn here. Is there anything you folks want to plug like social media presences or anything else? Or is it just come to fan gamer, spend money, be happy.

Oh, I got a big one. Reid, do you want me to say a big one for us? So off a delightful delightful indie RPG created by Mortis Ghost this was an inspiration for Undertale for a lot of indie game

dev, certainly surreal RPG came out 2008 was a free game we're making it cost money baby yeah so we're doing a remake of it that is being very true to the original expression

we're working directly with Mortis Ghost has added new content we've souped it up to a thing we're like okay you can always play the original or never you know that will never be charged for

but this is a new remaster that if you want to pay some bucks for you can get this new it is the old experience lovingly brought forward, and that'll be coming this year, I think I can say. So we're super excited to see it out there. We're going through like final tweaks and testing, but it's pretty much there. We're just so excited for it. So we have, I think we have pre-orders for merch and stuff like that. But if you liked Earthbound, if you thought Earthbound was a cool game, this is a game that was

absolutely the seeds of what Earthbound put out there. The indie devs branched off and made their own unique expression from that sort of diaspora of those sort of sensation. It's very cool. So please check it out if you've got time, if you like surreal RPGs. Yeah, I think anyone listening to this and who enjoys Earthbound should really enjoy that one as well. And to piggyback off that, this is the only plug I've got, is that part of the reason that we even know about off, that we found out about off, is because a fan translator, Quinn, actually took the fan translation and post about it on Starman.net.

It's kind of the way that most of the English playing fan base got into it is because of this post on Starma.net. So it's kind of wild hell convoluted. All these intertwining things have been over the years. One thing I'd want to mention, especially on the topic of Earthbound, is it's not my podcast, but some friends of mine, they have a podcast called Mother She Wrote, where it's a couple girls.

One of them is playing through Earthbound beginnings for the first time. They talk about it, you know, episode by episode, and there's also like this whole audio drama where they're basically recreating the story of it. It's really cool. They're eventually going to do Earthbound and Mother 3 as well in the future. It's very well done, and that community is part of what's keeping me in touch with all of the mother news that comes out because they're very involved in digging up all sorts of weird little tidbits.

So I highly recommend. And this has been another episode of Retronauts. Thank you so much for listening. And this is a completely Patreon-supported podcast. So if you want to support the show and get a bunch of bonus stuff, go to patreon.com slash Retronaut. Sign up for five bucks a month. With that, you get access to two bonus episodes every month, as well as a weekly column

and podcast by Diamond Fight. We've been doing those bonus episodes since the beginning of 2020. So there is a ton waiting for you there. If you have not heard any of our exclusive content, there's a bunch behind the Patreon paywall at Patreon. dot com slash retronauts and i've been your host for this one bob macky i'm on blue sky and other things as bob servo and my other podcasts are all on the talking simpsons network we have talking simpsons what a cartoon and many others uh those are available wherever you find podcast but if you go to

patreon dot com slash talking simpsons you can access all of our mini series and get ad free podcasts and we've covered things like uh futurama king of the hill mission hill batman the anime series and the critic and that's all happening at patreon dot com slash talking simpsons but that is it for us we're going to see you next time for another episode of Retronauts. Take care. Thank you.