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“Deleted” Nintendo floppy recovered 26 years later, full of Earthbound secrets

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.

On Friday, the Video Game History Foundation announced its restoration of a single Nintendo-related, 3.5-inch floppy disk, as discovered by original Earthbound translator Marcus Lindblom in 2018. The story sounds a lot like ones we've heard in the past, where someone from the gaming industry cleans out an attic or a storage unit only to find disks that they think are lost to time.

In Lindblom's case, he thought the Earthbound disk he'd discovered was lost to his own younger stupidity. At one point he learned, after putting it into an older computer, that he'd deleted the disk's contents to save other work on it. He donated the disk to VGHF with fingers crossed that they could work their magic, which they apparently did. As it turns out, only one small file had been saved to the disk after its "deletion," thus leaving most of the original magnetic media untouched. Forensic recovery tools managed to recover every single disk sector, revealing the SNES RPG's "complete" scripting files for English and Japanese text, along with related code for event triggers in the game.

 
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Joyful

Member
earthbound is one of my favorite rpgs

this is some interesting info imo, if anyone wanted a tl;dr:

basically its a shitload of notes on the translation and it has the canonical name of a ton of unnamed npcs you encounter during the game

confirmation the "voice" of the the coffee break segments is Itoi himself, most people guessed this but its nice to be sure

also the magic cake segment was originally supposed to be a back massage instead

oh and they cut some references to the first game.

lastly this is only like 15% of the total secrets so far, much more to be discovered apparently
 
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earthbound is one of my favorite rpgs

this is some interesting info imo, if anyone wanted a tl;dr:

basically its a shitload of notes on the translation and it has the canonical name of a ton of unnamed npcs you encounter during the game

confirmation the "voice" of the the coffee break segments is Itoi himself, most people guessed this but its nice to be sure

also the magic cake segment was originally supposed to be a back massage instead

oh and they cut some references to the first game.

lastly this is only like 15% of the total secrets so far, much more to be discovered apparently
Thanks for the TL;DR summary!
 
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Sidesalad

Member
This is the epitome of a buried treasure. I'm still waiting for the day when we get an Earthbound remake, but I know it'll never happen.
 
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