

A look at EarthBound's text system and scripting language (2011) - amyjess
http://earthboundcentral.com/2011/04/a-look-at-the-mother-2-side/

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nanny
Some context: The CEO and President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, passed away
recently. He is credited with saving EarthBound from cancellation by joining
the programming team.

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hkmurakami
You might be conflating this with the Super Smash Brothers Melee story, where
Iwata left his Nintendo HQ corporate strategy role to join HAL Laboratories
for QA & Bug Fixing so that the game wouldn't miss its ship date (this was 3
months before the launch date).

~~~
Zengor
Whether Earthbound was to be cancelled or not I don't know, but it's a similar
story in that he was the president (in the Earthbound case, of HAL
laboratories) but he joined the programming team. Unlike Smash, though, he
rewrote Earthbound entirely in a few months:
[http://kamedani.tumblr.com/post/45700864819/mother-2-re-
rele...](http://kamedani.tumblr.com/post/45700864819/mother-2-re-release-
discussion-part-1)

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Luc
It would be a neat little project to write a tool that renders all those
control codes as something more easily read. I wouldn't be surprised if this
were in fact the output generated by such a program.

On the one hand I think Iwata could easily have whipped up a little tool, on
the other hand I like to think he didn't need it :)

~~~
n42
Back in the early/mid 2000s I was involved with the PK Hack community, which
was/is a group of people who focus on reverse engineering the EarthBound ROM
(documenting and building editors for it, etc). I remember a guy named Flynman
was actually putting together a sort of EarthBound scripting language that
compiled down into the text engine's control codes. I'm not sure if that ever
led anywhere, but it sounded pretty cool at the time. I might dig around to
see if I can find it somewhere on the Starmen.net forums

edit: the original was called CCBasic, but I guess someone took the concept
and reworked it here:
[https://forum.starmen.net/forum/Community/PKHack/CCScript-A-...](https://forum.starmen.net/forum/Community/PKHack/CCScript-
A-new-revolution-in-text-editing-D/page/1/)

and the language docs:
[http://starmen.net/pkhack/ccscript/Tutorial.html](http://starmen.net/pkhack/ccscript/Tutorial.html)

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newobj

      [1F F0] (Activate Bicycle)
    

Well you don't get much more CISC than that.

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danschuller
Interesting stuff.

In a modern system an MVC (or similar) type architecture would work well for
dialog. Of course writing that kind of thing on the NES where every byte
counts would be a lot more challenging.

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curiousjorge
what made this game so fun and great for those that love it? I've played it on
an emulator 15 years ago and I thought it was okay but nothing really stood
out in my memory. Perhaps it would've been better if it had been played on an
actual SNES console in the 90s.

