January 21st, 2013 | Itoi

Last month Shigesato Itoi started to occasionally post messages on Twitter about some sort of MOTHER revival or MOTHER republication, and in one of his first messages he said:

the “MOTHER republication” thing I mentioned briefly before

The thing is, no one knew what the heck he was talking about. For pretty much everyone, including me, this was completely new news! I finally tracked down what he was talking about, so here’s what the series of events so far seems to be:

Lindsay (aka Chewy) met with Itoi on business and talked to him about fans outside of Japan. He seemed very interested and surprised at the following outside of Japan. (link)

Shortly after, Iwata mentioned in an interview that he and Itoi had been recently discussing the series’ fan base outside of Japan. (link)

Itoi organizes a MOTHER-series music concert with two well-known Japanese game music players. (link)

Itoi posts on Twitter (link):

I’m guessing Prof. Sakamoto and Hyadain played MOTHER 2 around the time they were in grade school. Man, so many interesting things have happened as a result of making those games.

To this, a Japanese fan on Twitter said, “Mr. Itoi! Please make a MOTHER series remake or let it get released for download! I wanna play them but I can’t buy them anywhere!!!!”

To this, Itoi responded with:

I’ll firmly tell Mr. Iwata tomorrow (laugh)

He mentioned the next day that he was heading to Kyoto (which is where Nintendo’s headquarters is), so Japanese fans wondered if there might be something MOTHER-y going on. Of course, he often goes to Kyoto anyway, so it was just fans being hopeful.

In a Twitter message, Itoi thanks MOTHER fans and specifically mentions Starmen.Net. (link)

The next day, Itoi posted lots of MOTHER stuff on his daily post of his site. (link)

A few weeks later, Itoi tweeted the big MOTHER-related news that caught everyone’s attention. (link)

Then, a few weeks after that (which is just a few days ago), he posted some more stuff about MOTHER developments. (link)

Note: For convenience, I’ll update this area with any new developments after I initially made this post.

A few days later, Itoi posted his thoughts about his meeting with Chewy. It’s clear he knows a lot more about overseas fans now. (link)

So that’s the general flow of events. Whether or not Chewy’s meeting had anything to do with it is naturally a big question mark, but I honestly think so from what she’s mentioned in the podcast and in person.

As always, I’ll post new info/translations as soon as I can, so stay tuned! If you don’t want to visit the site every day you can always follow EB Central on Facebook or follow EB Central on Twitter!