Mother, officially known outside of Japan as EarthBound Beginnings, is a 1989 role-playing video game developed by Ape Inc. and Pax Softnica and published by Nintendo for the Famicom. It is the first entry in the Mother series. It is modeled on the gameplay of the Dragon Quest series, but is set in the late 20th-century United States, unlike its fantasy genre contemporaries. Mother follows the young Ninten as he uses his great-grandfather's studies on psychic powers to put an end to the paranormal phenomena that recently spiraled the country into disarray. The game uses random encounters to enter a menu-based, first-person perspective battle system.

Creatures Inc. is a Japanese video game company affiliated with Game Freak and Nintendo, and is one of the owners of the Pokémon franchise. It was founded by Tsunekazu Ishihara in November 1995, with the assistance of then-president of HAL Laboratory, Satoru Iwata, as a successor to Shigesato Itoi's company Ape Inc.