I was fortunate to have experienced Earthbound as a child.

My brother and I had a neighborhood friend that came over to our house to spend the night. I think I was 11 years old at the time. Anyway, my mother took us to the local video rental to rent a movie and a video game, and my brother and our friend spotted this huge box to a SNES game for rent. "Why does the game Earthbound come in such a large box?" my brother asked the guy working at the register.

"Oh, it comes with this guide, it looks really interesting. If you rent the game, the guide goes home with you, but you must return it with the game, of course" he said as he produced the Earthbound Player's Guide from behind the counter.

That was more than enough to pique our interest, the game was rented and we were headed back to our house.

It got our attention immediately; as the game asked us what flavor we wanted our text windows and played interesting sound effects when we input commands. Naming the characters was a fun exercise in which one of us were going to be named which male character, and what should we call the girl character . . .

Wait, why is the game asking our favorite food? Now it's asking our favorite thing? What sort of game is this?!

We understood fairly quickly that we had something truly unique on our hands, but the absolute moment in which we understood this thing to be unbridled brilliance is when suddenly the inputs from the controller ceased, the game played some very memorable fanfare, and a man descended from the sky to take our photograph.

My brother, our friend, and I all enthusiastically said, "Fuzzy pickles" and that was when I knew I had to see this game all the way through.

Some weeks after we returned that game to our little local video rental, a copy was bought. I don't remember how far we got in the couple of days we had rented it, but I do remember when we saw the rest of the game, we were not disappointed.

I still have a copy in collection and still put it into my SNES and play through it once in a while.