All of my favorite moments are music-related. The Runaway Five concerts are right up there, but I'd have to say the trip across Lake Tess is the greatest. The trumpet music always chokes me up."

"It's difficult to choose, but I always get a little teary at the end when the player's name pops up."

"For me, there is a favorite part of EarthBound for individual feelings you like to experience in the game. Excitement, adventure, playfulness, reflection, etc., I think that is what makes the game great. One tune I constantly would hum would be Threed's song when the town was saved. It's the series of events when you return to Threed and go on a bus ride to Fourside. Something about that moment and the music resonated with me. It felt easily relatable to the real world and reminded me of good times with friends. That and the scratch and sniff cards."

"When I was 11 years old, leaving Onett for the first time was both thrilling and terrifying. After spending hours walking around every inch of town, you really begin to feel a sense of belonging. It's where you grew up, where your family and friends live, and where your adventure started. Eventually you take a long walk into a whole new unexplored town, and you're not only disoriented by the change of scenery, you become literally disoriented by the mushrooms attached to your head. Suddenly you're all alone in a desperate struggle to find which way you're supposed to go while you're walking backwards, sideways, and hitting yourself. It's like being on your own for the first time in the world, and it was as scary as it was exciting. Many other video games may portray a similar narrative, but I've never experienced it the same way as I did inEarthBound."

You see, Nintendo has always had some sort of EarthBoundproject dangling just out of reach from American and European fans. Take for example, the never-released EarthBound sequel for the Nintendo 64. Nintendo slowly dripped out images, delaying the release year after year before unceremoniously nixing the project. Had Nintendo simply ignored EarthBoundentirely, Starmen.net might have quit spending hours every night online discussing the same game with the same people.

"They were kind of the bad guy in a weird way even though they were responsible for making EarthBound in the first place," says Young. "They neglected us so ferociously that it just really connected us so tightly. It really cultivated an independent spirit."

The massive Japanese company became a foil, a Gigiyas to the small band of enthusiasts. The Earthbound.net community wrote more petitions and launched phone call campaigns. You hear that soldiers never forget those who fight alongside them. Earthbound.net was constantly at war with Nintendo, and though the cause may have been trivial, their bond was serious.

YOU MAY BE PICTURING A BUNCH OF PETULANT KIDS. SOME MEMBERS WERE GROWN-UPS, MEN WITH JOBS AND BANK ACCOUNTS.

Holidays and school breaks were reasons to gather online. The group counted down to the new millennium together, across different time zones, gleefully watching their web home survive the impotent Y2K bug. They were a family with an Internet forum for a living room.

You may be picturing a bunch of petulant kids. Some members were grown-ups, men with jobs and bank accounts.

"One of the guys ["Giovanni"] who donated a lot of money to the website showed up around 2000. The first time he sent in a donation I got this envelope with a bunch of bills stuffed in it. We're talking 1s, 5s, 10s. He sent like $200 dollars. My mom got to it before I did. I was 16 at the time and I came home and my mom was sitting at the kitchen table, and there was this envelope in front of her. And she looked at me and said "sit down," and I said "what's up," and she said "what's this?" And I look and ask where all this money came from and she says, "What are you doing online?" I had no idea this money was coming! [Giovanni] sent it out of the blue. He was the site's benefactor. He sent thousands of dollars over the years. Nobody knows where he got the money; he's like this weird shadowy figure."

With some financial support, Young had the opportunity to take the fan base into the real world. He, Steve and Camille Campos, and a couple teenagers converged on the Young family farm in Kokomo, Indiana in 2001 for the inauguralEarthBound convention, which would become what Young calls "an annual group vacation." (The most recent had 50 attendees.)

"The idea of running a fan site as a job never occurred to me when I was younger," says Young. "But after the conventions got rolling I found myself frequently daydreaming about building an offline Starmen.net community - instead of one convention every year, we could move near each other and hang out whenever."

Young's first offline relationship had already begun.