April 17th, 2013 | EarthBound

Nintendo announced on its latest Nintendo Direct video that EarthBound is slated to be released sometime this year on the Nintendo Wii U Virtual Console in North America. It’s also going to be released in Europe.

The Nintendo Direct link is here. The EarthBound stuff starts at around 22 minutes in. Iwata states that passionate fan messages on the MOTHER 2 Miiverse was a reason for the decision to release the game outside of Japan too.

The Nintendo Twitter account also mentions this news here.

I’ll have more info as I can find it – thanks to everyone who’s sent me news/info!

A couple people have e-mailed me asking if there are going to be any changes to the game – I honestly don’t know. The Wii U version of MOTHER 2 had some slight changes (mostly things that reduce brightly flashing animations) but no content was changed. So we’ll just have to wait and see. Hopefully, since the Japanese version didn’t need content changes, this version won’t either.

I’m not sure where to get good deals on Wii Us, so if you know of any place that has a good sale or deal or anything, let me know! For now, here are some on Amazon and GameStop. Update: Apparently you can get Wii Us at Costco for $199 if you have a Costco membership. They don’t have it on their site so I can’t confirm, but that might be a good way to get one for cheap!

Here’s a look at just the EarthBound part of the Nintendo Direct video:

UPDATE Again: Itoi just tweeted with the following, which I’ve translated: