Mother 3 for the Nintendo 64 was first publically announced around 1996. In 1997, screenshots and the game's subtitle - "Chimera's Forest" - were revealed. It seemed like the game was on the road to being completed, but after that, information on the game pretty much dried up.

The subtitle was later changed to "The Fall of the Pig King", and the game was now scheduled to be a regular N64 cartridge game instead of a N64 Disk Drive game.

In 1999, it could be found in playable demo form at Nintendo's annual Spaceworld event. That was the last time it was ever shown off; the game was cancelled in August of 2000.

In April of 2003, news about Mother 3 re-emerged, but it was now being developed for the Game Boy Advance. For more information about this GBA game, check out the Mother 3 section.

Mother 3 was originally intended to be for the 64DD accessory for the Nintendo 64 system. The benefits of the 64DD was that games could be bigger, and lots more data could be saved to them than on regular N64 cartridges. Save files could be hundreds or thousands of times bigger, meaning much more interactive worlds.

The system also included a built-in clock which games could use to keep track of time. This meant that games could sort of take place in real-time, much like the Animal Crossing games of today. An example of the clock's usefulness was this: a player could plant a seed in a field, and over time it would slowly grow. You could turn the game off for a long time or come back much later and the tree might be big enough to enter a new area or the like. Mother 3 was intended to use this to make towns and the world much more lively.

Mother 3 was reliant on the 64DD being released, but the 64DD was also reliant on Mother 3 - it was to be one of the first games released. Citing software development delays, the 64DD's expected late 1996 release kept getting pushed back. Since the future of the 64DD was uncertain, in 1999 it was announced that Mother 3 was going to be released on a regular N64 cartridge.

The 64DD was pushed so far back that it wasn't released until almost the same time the PS2 came out. All the main titles for the 64DD system had already been moved to cartridge form, so by the time it was released, it was already dead in the water.

Then, in August of 2000, half a year after the 64DD's release, Mother 3 was cancelled. Three months later in November, the 64DD was discontinued. And so both versions of the game wound up dead and destined never to be played by users.