After today’s stunner of an announcement via Nintendo Direct regarding the longed-for re-release of Earthbound on Wii U, I hereby declare that anything is possible.

Okay, maybe not anything, but this sudden acknowledgement of the Earthbound/Mother series’ existence by Nintendo of America came out of left field for a lot of people, myself included. You need only look at the outpouring of happiness from folks on Twitter to know that the company made fans’ days with that single announcement.

That being said, what took them so damn long!? I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, some history.