Itoi, Iwata, Miyamoto discuss EarthBound 64’s cancellation in 2000 interview – now translated

EarthBound 64 never saw the light of day in light of a tumultuous and lengthy development cycle. The project was ultimately canned in 2000 – and on the same day, Nintendo published an interview with Shigesato Itoi, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Satoru Iwata covering the cancellation.

You can find the full thing here. It’s a long read, but certainly worth checking out.

We did want to highlight one bit from Iwata that is making the rounds. He actually put a good amount of the blame on himself, stating:

That one was clearly my fault. A long time ago I once said, “Never say a programmer CAN’T do something.” Those words sort of take on a life of their own—dropping the word “can’t” can close the doors of possibility. Generally speaking, everything will work out eventually if you put in the effort and push onwards, but everything still operates within certain limitations. So if something is honestly impossible to do, you need to accept that. Oftentimes the case is that something is possible, but sacrifices will need to be made. Or that something is possible, but it cannot exist alongside some other thing. So that’s what I meant when I said “Don’t say you CAN’T be a programmer,” but “don’t say you CAN’T” is the only part that took off.

There was a time when the early designs for MOTHER 3 were really reckless. We were working with specifications that surpassed the system capabilities and memory capacity. We starting working on the game with the premise that we’d create something that’s never been done before.