The game was released June, 20, 2003. Earthbound topped the Japanese charts its first sales week, with 160,300 games sold. The game went on to sell 278,225 copies in 2003 and is off the charts by now. In Japan, Mother 1+2 was the 37th best selling game overall. For comparison, Final Fantasy X-2 was their top selling game, with a whopping 1,941,727 copies sold. And not far behind Mother 1+2 was Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, at #40 with 274,810 copies sold. The game sold fairly well, and those sales numbers seem spectacular for a port.
It looks like the game got a better advertising campaign than Earthbound did here. It started with interesting looking TV ads. Eventually, Coca-Cola got into the action, selling Earthbound figurines. Nintendo of Japan offers four guides on their Mother 1+2 site. I’m not entirely sure what they’re all for.
The rough translations I got said one was an “encyclopedia” which seemed to focus more on Mother 1, which cost about $8.50 when converted from yen to dollar. Another was a “map and capture chart”, costing $11.30. The third was a $11.30 “route guide”, and I wasn’t able to get a good translation of the description of the fourth book, which cost $10.80.
It sounds like they did a good job on the game. All the screen shots I’ve seen have been just as good as the real thing and Famitsu, the Japanese gaming gurus, rated it a 35/40. Itoi has lots of stuff going on his site, but I’m not sure what half of it is. He had a diary going from a while before the release to sometime in September, talking about how he felt about the project as time went on. It might not be on his site, but he threw a cool release party to promote the game and it seems like they still love him over there.
There’s still no word on an American release, but since the game didn’t have record-breaking sales, it seems unlikely.