The easiest way to have a successful Kickstarter campaign is to start with a good idea. Forming a publishing company to put out a series of books about classic video games? That's a great idea. It's no wonder that it took less than eight hours for Boss Fight Books met their funding goal. Let's take a look at what Boss Fight Books wants to accomplish, and which titles we can already look forward to.

EarthBound is making its way to the Wii U console later this year, which has fans excited, but what of it lesser-known sequel Mother 3? The game was never released in the U.S. but a group of fans went ahead and translated it as a patch for the game's ROM. They've even said Nintendo could use their translated script for free if they ever bring the game to America. Ball's in your court, Nintendo.

A week or two ago, video game aficionados were caught off guard when IGN reported that EarthBound creator Shigesato Itoi hinted at a potential re-release -- or a "republication" as he put it -- of the highly lauded and equally obscure Nintendo RPG franchise on Twitter. Nintendo is no stranger to repackaging some of their more classic titles either as anthologies or revised updates featuring new graphics and additional bonus features never before seen in the original. From Super Mario Bros. to Pokémon, nearly every franchise has at least seen one re-release in some form or another within U.S. markets, but, despite the fervent pleas of the devoted and nostalgic, the company has always looked over giving the Super Nintendo's EarthBound its proper due with a second lease on life in America, not to mention two games from the series that never reached the West. Even if Itoi's words ring true, this history of neglect on Nintendo's part  is something that cannot be ignored any longer.

Nowadays, piracy protection usually focuses on prevention rather than punishment, but back in The Day, before technology allowed constant Internet connections and horrible, system-degrading mechanisms, developers had to get creative with piracy protection. The above video shows one instance of how EarthBound, known as Mother in Japan, got clever and sneakily evil with their protection: At the boss fight with Giygas, the game freezes and forces the player to reset, and when they return to the saves menu, they discover the game erased their save file, causing them to lose all of their progress. EarthBound games are oldies, so the piracy protection focused on checking if the game was using a cartridge copier. At least back then, one could find humor in the ways developers dealt with piracy; now it's all constant Internet connections and registry edits.

(via reddit)

EarthBound, the SNES game that brought us Super Smash Bros.' Ness, was one of the great console RPGs of the '90s: it was funny, self-aware, and also had great gameplay. It also had a kickin' soundtrack, composed by Hirokazu Tanaka, who also composed soundtracks for Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid, and a number of other classic games. Tanaka even got a credit on Buckner & Garcia's classic 1982 arcade game rock album Pac-Man Fever for providing some of the sounds behind "Do the Donkey Kong."

Recently, Tanaka gathered together ten other random people also named Hirokazu Tanaka and had them sing a song of his composition called the "Hirokazu Tanaka Song" ("Tanaka Hirokazu no Uta"), the moral of which is that even though they didn't choose to be called Hirokazu Tanaka, they've all come together for the sake of a name, and "there's only one of me in the whole wide world." Not only is it a strange novelty single, it's also really, really catchy: