#snes games

NessfromEarthbound (SNES, 1994) made by Nintendo of Japan.

I was big into Earthbound as a kid, and my first online community was the Rocky Horror-esque subculture that formed around the game. When I was still in elementary school, I started drawing Earthbound-themed comics for a site that was then known as Earthbound.net under the pseudonym “Worker and Parasite,” or “WaP,” as they started to call me. The site is now called Starmen.net, and I don’t think anyone I knew is still there. A lot of the site’s ruling clique from my time went on to run the FanGamer merch store.

The further I get away from the game, the more I am inclined to think of Earthbound as being somewhat overrated, or at least over-praised. While it has a lot of very clever and funny moments, I think it’s a bit too disjointed overall, and is more a collection of ideas than a coherent whole. Mother 3, the sequel, is a far better game, in my mind, with a superior plot and more engaging characters, as well as a theme with higher, and I dare say more mature ambition.

As a work of whimsy and irreverence, however, few things have probably had a greater influence on me. 

Bowser’s castle from Super Mario World.

This set of three images were created to go alongside Chris Scullion’s review of the SNES Mini Classic console, which landed just last week!

In the main header image, I wanted to invoke a sense of a group of pals getting back together to play some games, after a long time apart. There’s a bunch of Nintendo characters in there that I’ve either never drawn before, or drawn very little of! This image was used in Chris’ main review here - https://tiredoldhack.com/2017/09/27/snes-mini-review/

In the second image, I wanted to play on the concept of a high-school style yearbook, ‘Most likely to…’ feature. Some of these franchises have went to some amazing places in the 20 years since the SNES, so I thought it’d be funny to imagine what they were doing now!

The final image was me testing a three panel comic layout. Back in the 90s, there was a pretty fierce rivalry between the SEGA Megadrive and the SNES - something Chris and I were all too aware of.

Both these images were used in a tips and tricks article by Chris, which you can read (and chuckle) at here https://tiredoldhack.com/2017/09/30/snes-mini-tips-special-90s-style/