In this section of the site, you can find essays and other written contributions from all kinds of people. Most of the people you'll be reading from have been club leaders at one time or another, or members who were really involved in the clubs.

An Essay from CrazedMogX
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I think we can say that the EarthBound community at its peak, around the Spring of 1998, led by SeCtoR X19 and his Sharks embraced what we were all about. Many of the people who were the important people in those clubs back then are now 15, 16, 17 years old, we've moved on to new things to get involved with (outside of the computer) and can now recall how those memories we had, with people we don't know, probably will never know, were good ones indeed.

I used to be heavily involved, I checked the message boards for the Sharks and EarthBound Gang, and posted semi-often. I ran in 2 AAVP elections for the Sharks, was the first ever Legendary Shark appointed by Nikolai64, was VERY briefly AAVP of the EarthBound Gang, was VP of the Mr.Saturn Nation and AVP of The Flying Men, I even led 3 clubs, the bomb called the Giygas Crew, the big yet inconsistent Rowdy Mice, and I briefly took over the Students of Snow Wood led by TekKid5203 (now JohnMcCEB) in 1998.

What's most important is to pinpoint the exact decline of the EBC. The warning signs were starting after the Summer of 98 concluded. SeCtoR X19 left the scene, and Nikolai64 did the best he could to keep the Sharks up, clubs died, faded, or were plagued by wars. When OnettNess gave up the EB Gang to EBG Ness (aka Deafcon2) the scene was over. Don't get me wrong, Deaf's done an amazing job, but ever since then it's been the EB Gang as the only real major player in the EB Scene. While it was short lived, for about 20 months or so, the EBC was a major force in many of our lives. We can look back at those times, as a good reminder of how we were when we were young. I hope the new 12, 13, 14 year olds can take off and start a 2nd wave of decent EB Clubs, but if that doesn't happen. At least we all remember how good the old days were.

An Essay from RedArwing
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I first got involved in the EarthBound Club scene back in early 98. I had bought the game online recently because I couldn’t find a copy of it anywhere else. I had wanted to buy it for a while since I played it at a friend’s house, and I finally got around to doing it. I first heard of the clubs when I was online at the AOL EarthBound message board. I read an advertisement for a club called the Mr. Saturn Gang, and joined. The gang only had about 30 or 40 members at the time, but it soon broke 100, 200, 300… I got to be pretty good friends with the leader of the club, Matingly22, and soon enough I wanted to start my own club. I did, and as few of you may remember, it was called Moonside. It was pretty pathetic at first, but we started to grow, and membership participation was great. I think the highest we ever got to was somewhere above 100 members. The club was an off and on thing for a while after that, and I think I must have ‘revived’ it a couple of times, most recently July 2000. I soon realized that with this massive lack of interest, it was nearly impossible to get an old club off the ground unless you had the kind of built in support like the EB Gang’s many members.

After all was said and done, I ended up with around 30 members left on the mailing list. Everyone else had either left AOL, or changed their screen name. I did what I could, and went through about 3 months of solid newsletters, but I was forced to slow down because of school and other events. As of 12/5/00 the last newsletter I sent out was 12/3/00, and I plan to keep sending them out. I definitely need more members though, so join if you want to!

I think the whole club community was awesome. It was larger than any other, and the game was so easy to have fun with. You could talk about it, make up stories, trivia, polls, EB was the perfect game for all of this. I played through the entire game again earlier this summer, and I think I will do the same again a few times before I put up my SNES…

An Essay from EBG Ness
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Where did I start out and all that in the EarthBound Community?

Whew.. Let's see. It had to be back in the Christmas of 1997. I'd gotten the top of the line computer which was outdated in 2 weeks and I was eager to see what this new World Wide Web had to offer.

I was surfing the internet one day when I looked up EarthBound in the AOL profiles and got a few people. I forgot who it was origionally but the main thing that made me join the EarthBound Gang (my first EB club) was the newly finished webpage.. that I learn was lauched just 2 days before I saw it.

I came into the EBGang meetings and made a basic pest of myself for the most part. Heh, I did a scrambler game where I would pic someone's screen name and then rip on it like.. "Onettness is a smelly peice of horse dung". Just truly horrible stuff that people with our little maturity levels got laughs at. During this time I'd met Matingly22, Tekkid5203, and Onettness of all which we became good friends.

I started a program called the EBUN which ended up crashing EB clubs because of sheer boredom. It was all fun and even had a project name called "Jenova Project". To this day I still regret some of the stuff I did, but it turned out awesome at the end.

In April of 1999, OnettNess had announced that he was going to close the club with no way of restarting it. For the many loyal EB Followers that he thought didn't exist.. we made a deal that if I'd filled the room I'd get a chance at leading. It did with plenty of time to spare and thus began my leading career!

Let's see. When I was first a leader I was the most awful leader of all. I'd been out to wreck stuff so at first, I'd no idea what I was doing. I forgot to BCC the entire member list.. Which was 4 pages long then. So that almost knocked me out.. if not for the encouraging words from Bearbear13. Sheesh, again.. one person's words save the club.

From that point on I tried things that we're totally different and the club skyrocketd. We'd hit 1000 members within 3 months and stayed constant at 1200. The letters were awesome, TWO meeting rooms would fill and it was great... and then I had to leave.

I won't keep everyone too long folks, I've left 3 times. One on a sick mom, one on a passed away mom, and one because I was fed up with all the crap that had gone on. To make my point stronger.. I'd usually left for some reason when the club was at the peak of popularity each time.

Right now? I'm playing Pokemon.. Onettness taught me how and gives me good deck configurations so I am the best in my league. I play Dance Dance Revolution and lead the EBGang which is a club on AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve.. with over 5000 members if you wanna combine the 3.. or 2200 for the AOL only one. We still fill our rooms.. but with all of the stuff that goes on, I must stress one thing Onettness said. It's not the same. I've told everyone that I'd give just about anything I had for some of the stuff that I got to do back then.. and although we're bigger and better.. it doesn't have the same feeling it did back then. Back then, everyone big in the EBGang new everyone big and if you played your cards right, you made it. Today it's a status thing where not much changes and everything is uniform. Now don't get me wrong.. it's great now but never the same.

An Essay from OnettNess
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15 now. I am. I started the EarthBound Gang when I was 11... how did it all start?

I got EarthBound for easter after I played it at a friend's house and just loved it. I played it, a lot, and just loved everything about the game. The characters, the crazy enemies, items, and music. So I must have put the word "EarthBound" in my profile without having to think. It was around May of 97. I got some E-mails from PoSeR0001, and SeCtoR X19 asking if I wanted to join these EarthBound clubs. I was so excited. I sure did. I signed on, and got a link to a chatroom from SeCtoR X19. The room was Onett Arcade. I was amazed. 23 people, talking, about EarthBound. Playing EarthBound scrambler. Having fun. Everyone there loved EB, just like me. I quickly made some friends, and went to meetings, got newsletters. The Sharks, this club led by SeCtoR X19, was just amazing.

But I wanted to try. Only 11, but determined I was. I decided to start my own club. A couple friends I met from the Sharks helped me think of the name "The EarthBound Gang" for the club. It was going to be that or the Octobots. I prefer EB Gang, better, anyway. So I started, only got 7 members, but wanted to quit. I was in a chat room talking to my friend PoeticLife, an EarthBound fan. It wasn't working. His words are the words that keep the EB gang running today. I told him, "Maybe I shouldn't lead.. I don't have what I need." He told me, "Nah, you can do it. Try it out." If he would have told me to give up, I would have in a second.

So I wrote a couple mini newsletters, just with an EB tip, trivia, and ranks I made up, which are the same ranks we use today, but with a couple new ones. We started with 7 members. I think the original members are Blitz98765, PigmaDanga, AwEsOmE 02, Ltjg Lotus, PoeticLife, Xusic and Buddyboy36.. all I know is the only of the original 7 still in today is Xusic. Xusic, you're somethin for still being here.

We needed new members. And the EB Gang had an idea. "The Quest for 30" This is probably the greatest act of the EB Gang, ever. Getting about 100 new EB fans, and from there on it just grew. The idea was whoever could get 30 new members first became the VP of the club. Who won.. I seriously don't know, I think it was Ltjg Lotus. But the EB Gang just grew, newsletters were colorful, and had tips, trivia, some ideas from SeCtoR X19 like EB What-if's and comparisons to the real life.. people liked this club. It had it's own meetings, too.

And the EB Gang continued to grow. We got new VP's, a lot of loyal members, then I got The EB Gang it's own AOL Message Board, which we still use today. We got an awesome web-site my friend Joe and I made, too. It had everything.

In 99, I think, SeC left AOL because of bad grades. From there, the Sharks went down. The EB Gang had just grown to 850 appr. members, becoming bigger than the Sharks. Personally, I always think SeC was jealous of the EB gang becoming more popular than this club.

Despite how much I loved leading, I didn't enjoy writing newsletters that took up all of my Monday from 2:30-7:30 at night. I didn't want to retire, but a friend of mine actually kinda made me do it. He kept tellign em it was pointless. (A real life friend). And I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life: I retired. I miss the EB Gang, everyday, I miss leading, I miss all my old friends, but it's too different now for me to return. No one even knows me. No one knows who started the club.. but it's okay, I'm just glad to see you guys have fun. Unfortunately, it's not about EB asmuch as it used to be, but oh well, the game is old. I chose EBG Ness(Deafcon2) to replace me. I could not have made a better choice. Deaf, you impress me everyday for keeping this club together. Currently I play Pokémon TCG a lot, and am ranked one of the top players of the world. I work for PoJo's Pokemon Magazine, and at pojo.com, doing Ness' card of the day... have fun, guys!
-Jason K

An Essay by LTCJoeAsA
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I've been in the EarthBound Community for as long as I've had AOL, and joined the EarthBound Gang, back in the beginning of '98. What a new and exciting experience it was to be a part of a club back in the days of AOL 3.0. We were all newbies back then, and each with our own newbieish ways, but we had so much fun. Back then, I was a member of the Desert Monkeys, led by BearBear13, as well as a few now forgotten EB clubs, which, well, I've seemed to forgotten. No, I was never once a member of the Sharks, and at that time of the war with the Sharks, I was still becoming accustomed to the EBG, as well as maintaining my own floundering club, the Secrets of Avalanche, which lasted a good three months before dying, and was also a member of Final Fantasy United, which I still am a member of. Seemed like a whole damned mess back then, but I was in 7th grade then. What's a life?

As I grew up, the EBC grew up with me...well...partially. Clubs merged, some clubs, unheard of by me, had begun to flourish, others declined. When OnettNess resigned as President of the EBG, I wondered if the most powerful of the EarthBound clubs had just tossed in the towel, and decided to get on with life. Then, a man, of whom I'd never really paid much attention to, Deafcon2, became president. Suddenly, a lot of things changed drastically.

I started paying more attention to the EBG, and as my own club died, FFU passed into a coma, and the Sharks merged with the EBG, I looked back at the EBC, almost from the outside, looking in. At that time, I'd been focusing more on a role-playing forum called Mog's Realm, and doing the bare minimum in each club I was in. As they dwindled, I found more time for the EBG, and thus started a new wave of activity.

I never really got that involved in the EBC's happenings until about six months ago, when I found myself a way into the good graces of the higher-ups within the EBG. Having been at the highest member rank in EBG, I pushed on, and eventually got to Apple Kid, quite an accomplishment. I still worked my ass off for the club, at one time holding the highest number of tokens within the entire club, for activity. About two months ago, I began to become fully aware of the position I was in within the EBC, and that I could actually make an important difference. Recently, I've become a council member of the EBG, and am running, as stated 'fore, for Apple of Enlightenment. I'm hoping to now, finally, after three long years of work, to make my mark on the EBG, the EBC, and all gaming clubs out there affiliated with the EBC.

An Essay from Cueball4ever
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As many of you are now aware, the EB empire that existed online for many years, has fallen to ashes. While Nintendo's decision to cancel the Mother 3 (EarthBound 2) project may have struck the final blow to our hopes and dreams of continuing the clubs and fun times we had doing all the crazy stuff we did, I would like to see our work and memories preserved, so that we can always be aware of what we did, and maybe, just maybe, one day resurrect our community.

While my dreams can be called unreal and not possible by people all around, the idea that all the work and effort that went in the numours clubs and is now practically forgotten is disgusting. How can we simply push aside our former lives online and pretend like it never happened? I will not beg or bitch for your sympathy. I instead ask for respect for the people you see on this wonderful page. They did something in hopes of giving Earthbounders something to enjoy and be a part of. While only the leaders and well-known members of the "EB empire" are listed in the site's sections, I wish to thank all loyal members. Who are we without them? No one. They made our clubs worthwhile and meaningful. Leaders like us merely helped them and made sure they could always come to that meeting the next day and try to make sure they had as good of a time there as they did this time.

I don't know what the future holds for me or EarthBound. I have heard very recently that it is finally over, and we have no future online. I sincerely hope this is not true, but reality is a harsh thing. Thank you Red, for making this page, for all of us to look back on the times we cherished so much.

An Essay from HaRdCoReMaTiNgLy/Matingly22
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The Mr. Saturn Nation was never meant to be a big, huge Earthbound club. When I created it, all I had in mind was to send an update once in awhile, and chat with members about Earthbound. However, after making two newsletters, I was hooked. From there "DA EARTHBOUND CLUB" grew into the Mr. Saturn Nation, which is considered to be one of the greater clubs there has been.

It all began back in January of 1998. Having nowhere to go and nothing to do, I stumbled upon the VGS. After searching through the message boards, I found an Earthbound board. I was shocked that there were actually other people out there who LOVED Earthbound! After thinking about it, I decided to try my luck, and make my own Earthbound fan-club. My first newsletter had about 6 recievers, and was probably half the length of this writing, up to this point. It also consisted of no colors, and a regular arial font. I still thought it was great. After this, I decided to name it the Mr Saturn Gang. The second newsletter was sent on Valentine's Day, and being the stupid little 13 year old I was, I sent it out in Valentine's colors. It was after this newsletter that it started to catch on. It was also after this newsletter that I discovered how vast the Earthbound Internet World truly was. NYCBarts23 showed me an Earthbound Gang newsletter, and I was shocked by how good it was. I then went to the Earthbound( EarthBound MB ) and became even more shocked after seeing the Shark's advertisement-"Join today, we have over 900 members"! To me, it truly was one of the coolest things I ever discovered. I soon came into conflict with Onettness, as I without knowing made my meeting time the same as his. As mad as he was, more people noticed my club because of his vocal ranting and raving against my meetings. Today I thank Onettness, 'cause it helped my club in the long run!

I soon hit 100 members(6th issue I believe) and I changed the name to the Mr Saturn Nation. I adopted a set of colors as well for the club. I soon expanded into more things..I made a website(which is still around), ran bigger meetings, and held many contests. Many considered the MSN to be the best club out there, and it angered some out there. However, we were extremely close with most of the clubs. Those "classic summer meetings" originated that summer. As we peaked to nearly 500 members however, I came across a problem.

It turned out that on September 1, 1998 I would be moving into a new house. It was only a few blocks away, but regardless was a hassle. I wrote the 23rd newsletter, and an "MSN sponsered" Earthbound Club wrestling event the night before I packed the computer up. Many things went on as I was gone. The EB Gang got their own message board, there were several wars, and many other clubs emerged. I began the 24th newsletter but I couldn't finish it. SectorX19 then left in October..which left many people confused and shocked.

It just wasn't in me to run the club anymore. I finally finished the 24th newsletter in early January of '99, and put the club on "hold". A few meetings were held here and there..but I lost contact with many members, and the club was finished. I proceeded to hand it over to Cueball4ever, who made NL#25, but didn't have the time to run it.

Not quite. One night almost a year later, I decided to pull it back. I e-mailed the whole list of around 500, and got rid of about 200 dead names. I sent out MSN NL #26, which didn't come out too well. I tried using 5.0 for it, with new fonts and all, but it didn't look right on other computers. I came with the 27th newsletter, which was considered to be the greatest one yet. And there hasn't been one since then.

I don't know if I'll ever bring it back, for one last run. But I do know one thing..that I'll never regret leading this club, and I'll never forget the people I've met from it. Long live the Earthbound Community.

All Essays presented on this site were used with permission of the author, and in using them for another purpose, you should ask permission too.

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'The History' is a project by RedArwing, Cueball4ever, and kwalka. 2000-2001. This site is in no way affiliated with Nintendo, APE Software, or Shigesato Itoi. All materials presented on this site are used with permission of the original owner/creator. Dedicated to all the members, leaders and participants of EB Online. Thanks for everything.