Retired President and Chief Operating Officer of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aimé has released a new book, Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo, and he’s making some news about Mother 3.
In the book, Reggie reveals that the “initial decision” not to launch Mother 3 for western regions was made before he joined the company. He commented that Nintendo did consider bringing the game to the Virtual Console on the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U, but that plan, unfortunately, never got off the ground.
Reggie says that for Nintendo, localizing Mother 3 just wasn’t a priority for Nintendo; the company didn’t think it made financial sense to localize the Earthbound sequel, and they were busy working on new games at the time.
Before Satoru Iwata, the former president of Nintendo, passed away in 2015 due to complications from a tumor in his bile duct, Reggie says he spoke with him about localizing a version of Mother 3. But when Iwata died in 2015, discussions about bringing Mother 3 to the Wii U came to an end.
“The initial decision not to launch the game had happened before I joined the company, but certainly afterwards I had many conversations with Mr. Iwata about this game, about the fan passion, and certainly the perspective was the first game on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System had not sold all that well. Certainly as I’ve gone back to look at it, the marketing wasn’t great. I think it was marketed some bizarre way like ‘this game stinks’ or something like that. It really was not the best marketing activity behind the launch of a new game. Because it hadn’t sold well, because yes there’s a lot of time and financial investment in localizing this type of content, it just really wasn’t a priority.”
– Reggie Fils-Aimé
