Earthly secrets discovered on an old floppy disk

We often tell you, but video games are not just games, a story, events, a tradition that needs to be preserved. The field is so vast that we will never stop inventing new things, especially around the design of a game. So, coincidentally, a former Nintendo employee finds a floppy disk containing information on Earthbound, which is intriguing.

Image Credit: Nintendo / VGHF

read more: Earthbound 64: Old images from Space World 1996 have been discovered

A bit of a coincidence as always

The name Marcus Lindblom does not quite fit you, unless you are a die-hard Earthbound fan. An Nintendo employee in the United States was responsible for locating the mother, which became terrestrial in North America. An important detail, because in 2018 the man found a box with old data from his job in the game. Also a floppy disk was more accurate, but its contents were unfortunately destroyed for reuse. A common and normal procedure.

It would have stood there and lost the data permanently. Except in computing, deleted data does not mean that it is lost, unless it is completely overwritten by another data. It is no longer “specified” on the medium (floppy disk, hard disk, etc.) so Windows will not know it exists and will not show it to you.

In the case of this floppy disk, the miracle is that Lindblom modified the file containing his works on Earthbound, with a few lines of text along with a small text file. So the first file was not completely overwritten and was on the floppy disk, for many years. This allowed Frank Cifalti, co-director of VGHF, to dig into the data to uncover all the secrets of Clyde Mandel, the translator of Mother 3.

The The list of inventions is long And the research is not yet complete, but for example, we can cite the character of the flower who must have “magical” ability, so he is less likely to be targeted by enemies. It has been modified with the ability to allow it to turn into an enemy.

At one point in the Earthbound, there is a passage where a woman gives us a “magic cake” that will wipe out our characters. Initially, this should simply be a passage where our protagonists are massaged and asleep. We even know that the girl’s name is Martha. One detail, but always interesting to know if you know that a good portion of the names of the characters in the game are never revealed.

An alternative result, a spin-off, is even possible to be cut from the final game. You can find a line of conversation referring to a lizard bringing a letter to Ness from a missing enemy Boki.

The list of inventions is very long and takes a whole page to index, but it is still the best invention. In particular it allows us to know a little more about the development process of the Earthbound, but also the details that can be lost forever.