Base: Mother 3 · Game Boy Advance · 2008 · Translation
Creator: Clyde Mandelin (Tomato) and team
A professional translator spent two years producing a complete English Mother 3 for free, then publicly offered to hand the entire script to Nintendo at no cost if it would release the game officially.
Mother 3 was released for the Game Boy Advance in Japan in April 2006, the conclusion of the series known in the West through EarthBound, and Nintendo did not localise it. The reasons were never fully explained and the demand did not go away — EarthBound's Western audience was small but exceptionally organised, and a sequel existing in a language they could not read was an unusually concentrated grievance. The translation project was led by Clyde Mandelin, who works professionally as a Japanese-to-English translator, alongside a team handling hacking, graphics and script insertion. It released in October 2008 after roughly two years of work. The technical side was not trivial: the game had to be reworked to accommodate a variable-width font and English text lengths that a Japanese script does not budget for, and the patch is substantially an engineering project as well as a translation one. What distinguishes it from other fan translations is the quality bar and the stance the team took toward the rights holder. The script is widely regarded as being at or above commercial standard, particularly in handling the game's tonal register — Mother 3 moves between broad comedy and genuine bleakness, and the translation preserves the transitions rather than flattening them. The team distributed only a patch, never a ROM, and stated openly that if Nintendo ever chose to release Mother 3 in English it would provide its work free of charge and shut the project down.