A group of marketing materials for Earthbound was recently picked up on eBay by a gamer known as "Jesse" and, like a good gamer, he shared his good fortune with the internet. Once of the more interesting pieces includes a retailer book with information about the upcoming game to encourage stores to carry it.
As you can see above, one of the encouragements used was the promise of a $2 million marketing push aimed at a youth demographic. That's a lot of scratch for them to have spent on a game, particularly back in the carefree days of the mid-nineties. That's also a lot of money to get burned on if the product doesn't move. Earthbound didn't.
Of course, things might have changed where the actual campaign was concerned. It's entirely possible that Nintendo never spent near this amount when it came right down to it. But, if true, that would certainly explain all the reticence the company has shown towards localizing and releasing other titles in the series for a North American audience.
EarthBound’s Marketing $2 Million? [Earthbound Central via GoNintendo]
Conrad Zimmerman is Destructoid's News Editor and home to the busiest mustache in the gaming press. An amateur historian and pop culture fanatic, Conrad possesses a nearly limitless wealth of videogame factoids and a passion for the power of games to teach, inspire and entertain. He enjoys reading, writing and turning things which should be fun into work.
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Contest:
2:00 AM on 04.16.2010 | 
Thanks, Nintendo! Now make it happen! :)
Anybody else old enough to remember those? Worst marketing ever.
$2 mil is a pretty low advertising dollar amount these days compared to a lot of other similar level profile games.
No way Nintendo's lawyers will ever let this see the light of day again. Thats why used copies of the game, even just the cart, sell for more than it originally MSRP'd for.
Something tells me they spent about 3$ on Earthbound's marketing. Considering how poorly it was marketed. I was really young and I remember being embarrassed by their advertisement work for it.
YOU CANNOT GRASP THE TRUE FORM OF GIYGAS' ATTACK!
It h-h-h-h-h-h-h-urts.......
And that's another reason why it didn't sell besides the fact RPGs were still coming on before FF7: there's like three things that are gross in the game. The advertising was a terrible idea--no excuse. Again, what were they thinking?
Best regards, Katya, CEO of xp burner, iscsi target software windows