| When Earthbound was released in the summer of 1995, it didn't sell as well as Nintendo thought it would. Many fans of the game have come up with different theories about why the game didn't sell. Some of those theories include poor advertising and mediocre graphics. Those were probably two things that kept it from selling as well as a mario game, but there is one event that most of these people have missed. The game was released in 1995, near the end of the SNES's lifespan. At that time, the Playstation was starting to gain popularity. Hype for the Nintendo 64 was also building up at the time. Six years later, in 2001, the same thing is happening. Video gamers aren't buying as many games for the older systems like Nintendo 64 or playstation because of all the new systems that are coming out. Instead of buying something like Paper Mario, some video gamers are spending most of their money on Playstation 2 or Dreamcast games.
When Earthbound was released, video gamers were informed that the Nintendo 64 was to be released sometime during the next Spring. Many of them weren't nearly as interested as the SNES as they were before because of all the potential the Nintendo 64 and Playstation had. The Playstation was already out and brought things to the world of video gaming that just put people in awe. There weren't many games that were in 3d for the 16 bit systems and those that were looked very poor compared to the playstation games. Video gamers were much more concerned with this new 3d system than they were with a SNES RPG that had mediocre graphics for a 16 bit game. If Earthbound had better graphics, that could have helped sell the game, but not by much because of all the interest in all the new systems.
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