Animal Crossing

Kelsey Lewin

Boss Fight Books
Los Angeles, CA
bossfightbooks.com

Copyright © 2024 Kelsey Lewin
All rights reserved.

ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-34-0
First Printing: 2024

Series Editor: Gabe Durham
Associate Editor: Michael P. Williams
Cover Design: Cory Schmitz

PREFACE

“The original Animal Crossing” can refer to several different games, except they’re really all the same game. Kind of. It’s confusing, I know. If you’re in the West, you might be picturing the game’s release on the GameCube, and yes, it’s that! But it’s also Dōbutsu no Mori, or “Animal Forest” as it literally translates to, which was first released on the Nintendo 64 exclusively in Japan in 2001. It was late enough in the Nintendo 64’s lifecycle that it didn’t stay there for long—the development team added new features and brought it to the GameCube that same year as Dōbutsu no Mori+. No core mechanics were changed—the game was simply built with an updated list of items and villagers, and a few new tricks up its sleeve. What we ultimately saw in 2002 as Animal Crossing—the Western world’s first experience with the series—was a version built from Dōbutsu no Mori+, but with several changes beyond just its translation, like the inclusion of new Western holidays and furniture. This Animal Crossing was re-translated back into Japanese with the Western holidays intact (plus a few more features) and released only in Japan as Dōbutsu no Mori e+ in 2003. The history, development, and philosophy behind these four games are essentially identical—because they are the same game.1

Of course, there are anecdotes that apply only to the development of the Western Animal Crossing on the GameCube, but everything about the development of Dōbutsu no Mori on the Nintendo 64 also applies to any of the GameCube versions. Think of GameCube Animal Crossing like a second printing of a book that includes a few bonus chapters.

This book is about “the original Animal Crossing,” which really means it’s about all of these versions at the same time.

1 Of course, Animal Crossing also released in Europe and Australia, and a version even made its way to China, but the point that “they’re all basically the same game” still applies.

INTRODUCTION

“Animal Crossing is a very inconvenient world,” admits series director Katsuya Eguchi. Some say it’s a game that can never be completed, and others say it’s a game that ends when you’re satisfied. It’s an easy world to live in and yet nothing in it comes easy. Its critics say it’s a game of chores and tedium, and its biggest fans say it’s an extension of the soul. In fairness, these are all probably true, because Animal Crossing is not a game that forces you to do much of anything. Much like life itself, Animal Crossing is what you make of it.

That’s…a weird way to describe a video game, but no matter how you slice it, Animal Crossing is tough to explain. You move into town as the sole human in a village full of anthropomorphic animal neighbors, each with their own personalities. It’s a small, simple community where everyone knows each other, and that’s all you get—there’s no exploring the rest of the world. The game is set on a clock system synced to the real world, so when there’s a holiday in the real world, there’s a holiday in the game, too. You can do a variety of activities in town like fishing, bug-catching, collecting furniture, chatting with your neighbors, designing clothes, writing letters, and attending community events—but even a list like this doesn’t really explain much. Those things sound pretty mundane, and yet the series is now one of Nintendo’s highest-earning franchises, with Animal Crossing: New Horizons even eclipsing the original Super Mario Bros. for all time sales in Japan. So what gives? Why do people love Animal Crossing?

Ask around and you’ll get dozens of different answers. For me, I was first drawn in by the charming art style and the promise of freedom. I was an angsty, unpopular schoolgirl when I first found the game, and it looked like an escape. Not limited by the totally unfair rules my mom set in the real world, I could paint my virtual room black or wear a shirt with a skull on it (well okay, it was a dress, and I wasn’t thrilled about that), and not a soul would judge me for it. I could express myself and still be just as important a member of my town as all of my neighbors. Sure, I liked fishing, designing custom clothing patterns at the tailor, and decorating my house, but what I really loved about Animal Crossing was that the community I inhabited felt…real.

There was something about it that struck me creatively the same way Dungeons & Dragons or IRC text roleplay did for many kids. It’s obviously not a “Role-Playing Game,” but instead felt like something more akin to playground LARPing2. I knew that the animals in the game weren’t real, and weren’t so advanced that they literally understood the letters I wrote to them, but I always wrote to them as if they did. I wanted my little part of the world to feel alive.

Animal Crossing excels in its creative tools. There are hundreds of pieces of furniture to find and arrange, and an infinite amount of custom patterns you can make to adorn your clothes, walls, and even signs around town. But it’s not just about wearing the clothes you want to wear or making a room look pretty—it’s about carving out and curating a corner of the world that reflects who you are. How you express yourself creatively is how you communicate your identity.

Animal Crossing also appeals to completionists and collectors. To fill and complete the town’s museum, there are well over 100 different items to obtain—some of which are incredibly rare or can only appear under certain conditions. To collect all the furniture in the game and complete the game’s catalog is even more difficult. These are sizable challenges that can take literal years to complete, but chipping away at them feels satisfying, and the payoff personal. The game’s major goals reward you with little more than cosmetic bragging rights—unique pieces of furniture or items that exist only to communicate that you’ve succeeded.

And of course, some people simply find Animal Crossing a relaxing experience. There’s joy in simplicity, and a peaceful village life of fishing, planting trees, and chatting with neighbors is just… nice. Our real lives are full of obligations, deadlines, and decisions, but Animal Crossing requires nothing of you. It’s a slow-paced world where it’s easy to take your time existing.

To be honest, there’s not a lot of actions in Animal Crossing that I can describe as concretely “fun.” There are collectible furniture items in the game that let you actually play classic NES games. (A game within a game! That’s pretty cool?) Fishing and catching bugs, or chopping down a tree with an axe, might be considered kind of fun. But the game isn’t enjoyable because of its gameplay—it’s because of something a lot more abstract.

Animal Crossing is billed as a “communication game,” which is not really a genre, yet no other genre really fits. The idea of enjoying communication is baked into the game at every level. Talking to your neighbors reveals their bright personalities and amusing, lifelike dialogue. Sharing your designs, your house, and your town with others is a fun way to express yourself (to actual people). Even “analog” means of communication, like writing letters and posting notices on the local bulletin board, are heavily encouraged.

Perhaps most importantly, playing Animal Crossing over the course of months, even years of your life, is an entirely different experience than trying the game for just a little while. Your town becomes your community, and existing in that community feels purposeful. You won’t notice it happening. Your animal neighbors might seem plenty friendly when you meet them, but they’re just characters in a video game. It’s not until you’ve seen them around town every day, spoken to them hundreds of times, and shared holidays with them that you’ll realize they’ve slowly become an actual part of your life. And that sense of community feels real.

It feels real because it doesn’t depend on you at all. You may have a cool house and snazzy clothes to parade around in, but you’re not special. Life moves on for your village whether you’re there to see it happen or not—like reality, your participation in the world is optional. There is no “completing” Animal Crossing, no true endgame, no grand rewards, and no consequence for doing nothing at all. Anything you choose to do in the world of Animal Crossing, any goal you pursue, is a choice you make for yourself… and that makes it meaningful.

No other game captures this feeling. Animal Crossing is made up of hundreds of disparate elements all braided together in a way both brilliantly detailed and astoundingly simple. The details create life: bushes rustle as you walk through them, your neighbors turn their heads to look at you as you run past, or stop to admire a butterfly. The simple life you live is full of tiny surprises, and because the game runs in sync with real-world time, you’ll be discovering new things at different times of the day and with each new season.

“Try to check-in on your town every day, even if just for a bit,” producer Takashi Tezuka advised players in a 2001 interview right around the game’s release. “We’ve prepared a number of unique events that happen throughout the course of the year, so even if playing every day is hard, just checking in periodically can be fun, to see what’s changed.”

Animal Crossing is alive. Nearly every day you’re greeted with something different than the day before, whether it’s a traveling visitor peddling rare items, a fishing tournament, or a special holiday. You can’t see it all unless you come back to it over and over again. It’s a slow and satisfying burn.

Perhaps you’ve read all of this and you still don’t “get” it. I’ve waxed on about feelings and community and communication, but none of this quite sounds like a video game. Here’s the thing: No one really “gets” the original Animal Crossing. Not its fans, not its critics, not the people in charge of promoting it, not even its creators. Nearly every review boils down to “look, I don’t know, I can’t explain why it’s fun, it just is, okay?” In fact, I think it’s going to take a whole book to explain.

2 Live Action Role-Play, a type of role-play in the real world that includes elements of improvisational character acting.

History’s Important, You Know!

Hisashi Nogami does not speak English. I, for all of my late night Duolingo sessions, do not speak Japanese. So when a friend of mine at Nintendo told me that he could introduce us, I was all nerves and barely-suppressed fangirlism. I met Animal Crossing’s co-director Nogami in 2018 at Nintendo’s E3 booth (well, their much less colorful, two-story press room and work area behind their E3 booth), and was surprised to see him look so straight-lipped and serious. After all, he was here promoting DLC for his wacky, urban squid-based shooter Splatoon 2, and had been photographed just hours ago doing silly poses in a lab coat and sunglasses. We exchanged polite small talk through a translator, but his demeanor changed instantly when I brought out my Japanese copy of Dōbutsu no Mori, the very first Animal Crossing game for the Nintendo 64.

“Oh! Wow!” He said, his face lighting up. “I can’t believe you have this. I’m honored to meet such a big fan.”

I wasn’t there entirely for an autograph, but I certainly wasn’t going to turn one down either as I watched him grab a sharpie and stare thoughtfully, smiling at the box. I instantly recognized what he was drawing: Bob, a fan-favorite villager, the lazy-looking purple cat whose catchphrase is an onomatopoeia of blowing a raspberry. This was the Nogami I knew. I had my friend ask him if Bob was his creation.

“Oh, Bob!” he said in English, flashing a warm, toothy grin. And then in Japanese: “Yes, yes, Bob is the best!” I was a little surprised he instantly recognized the name: In my excitement I had completely forgotten that the character is not “Bob” to him, but called “Nikoban” in Japan instead. Nikoban, like many of the villagers’ names, is a pun. It’s a play on the phrase “Neko ni koban” (a gold coin to a cat), which shares the same meaning as “pearls before swine.” It’s a perfect name, and a perfect expression of Nogami’s goofball nature.

Nogami began at Nintendo in 1994, about four or five years before work started on Animal Crossing. In 1990, then-president of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi realized his company’s future faced a new potential issue. The Famicom’s3 unprecedented success within a growing video game industry brought in droves of wannabe game creators: Kids now wanted to make games when they grew up, and game design courses were starting to pop up at universities. This was great news for the industry, but for Nintendo to maintain its position on top, it would need to consistently hire the best new talent. Their solution was to partner with one of Japan’s largest marketing firms, Dentsu, to create a program they called the Nintendo Dentsu Game Seminar. It was something like a cross between an internship and a college degree program. Hundreds of applicants to the program were narrowed down to a class of just 30 talented students who would work on site at Nintendo’s office, receiving hands-on training and creating their own games in groups to gain valuable industry experience before potentially joining the company full-time. The first two years of the ten-month program were held only at Nintendo’s Tokyo office, a satellite office historically used for sales and marketing, but in its third year, another seminar began in Osaka, where a young Hisashi Nogami was attending Osaka University of the Arts.

Inside the gray, unassuming Osaka office, Nogami spent his time surrounded by sterile white walls, attending lectures, and learning to design games for the Super Famicom. Despite the uninspiring environment, his student work at the Nintendo Dentsu Game Seminar was good enough to get him hired: After graduating from Osaka University of the Arts and the seminar, he was brought on board at Nintendo as a designer full time.

Almost immediately, Nogami found himself entrusted to work on some of Nintendo’s most important burgeoning franchises, like The Legend of Zelda and Mario Kart. His very first credited game was one of the most iconic: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, the follow-up to Super Mario World, brought to life with his now iconic hand-drawn, crayon-like art style.4 Although Nogami’s initial game credits were as an artist, it was not uncommon at Nintendo for artists to quickly become full-blown game directors—and that’s exactly what he would do a few years later.

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“Nintendo? What, that card company?”5 The year was 1986. 20-year-old Katsuya Eguchi was just about to graduate from Japan Electronics College and was still laboring over where to apply for work when he was done, when a friend suggested he try to find a career in video games, something he knew Eguchi to enjoy.

“I loved video games, but I never had a console… I always went to the arcade to play,” Eguchi said years later, recalling this story. “I had actually never heard of the Famicom or NES! But I thought, hey, I like games…so let’s see what I can do!”

With a degree in computer graphics in hand, he applied to Nintendo later that year. Leaving friends and family behind in his home prefecture of Chiba to work in Kyoto was a lonely, sobering experience for the young Eguchi. He’d spent his whole life in Chiba, 300 miles away, so receiving a job offer from Nintendo was exciting but intimidating. His first brush with a Famicom system, then nearly three years old, wasn’t until he arrived at Nintendo, where he discovered a colleague playing Super Mario Bros. The Super Mario Bros. series would become his first credited project, doing level design work on Super Mario Bros. 3 and eventually Super Mario World, shortly thereafter being entrusted with a director role on Star Fox for the Super Nintendo. Enthusiastic and creative, Eguchi quickly became a staple of Nintendo’s growing development staff.

A few years and several games later, the now-senior Eguchi and the still-fairly-fresh Nogami worked together on Yoshi’s Story. Like many games in development around this time, Yoshi’s Story was originally slated to be a title for the ambitious new hardware add-on for the Nintendo 64, the 64DD. Using magnetic disks instead of cartridges, games for the 64DD could store data cheaply and write directly to the disk (rather than by using an expensive battery inside the cartridge.) The system itself was full of promising features like online capability and an internal clock. Also like many games in development at the time, Yoshi’s Story ultimately became a standard cartridge-based game instead. With that project wrapping up, and perhaps with some of their disk-based ideas left unrealized, Nogami and Eguchi found themselves trying to come up with concepts for a new game for the 64DD.

By now it had been more than a decade since Eguchi was hired, and he felt nostalgic for his hometown. He missed being able to spend time with his family and friends, and the sense of familiarity and community he shared with them. “I wondered for a long time if there would be a way to recreate that feeling,” Eguchi said. “That was the impetus behind the original Animal Crossing.”

Based just on Eguchi’s recollection—which reflects Animal Crossing quite well—it’s tempting to assume the game didn’t change much from its initial conception. After all, Animal Crossing is, in the words of Eguchi, themed around the core concepts of friendship, community, and family. But it didn’t always appear that way.

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The story of Animal Crossing’s development first starts in the space between Yoshi’s Story’s international release date in 1998 and Eguchi’s new “communication game.” During that brief interim, he and Nogami were assigned to work as advisors on an odd new concept called Mario Artist: Talent Studio6—part of a series of 64DD software all named under the Mario Artist umbrella.

Mario Artist built on the foundation that its 1992 predecessor Mario Paint built—not a traditional game, but creativity software for drawing, painting, animating, and composing. While Mario Paint cast a wide net for all kinds of artistic exploration, the Mario Artist series software was more specialized and robust. After being briefly touted as a singular monolithic Mario Paint 64, the first three split titles—Paint Studio, Polygon Studio, and Talent Studio—were announced during Nintendo’s 1997 Space World7 event as complementary programs that could work together to bring creations to life. 2D images drawn in Paint Studio could be applied as textures to the 3D models in Polygon Studio, which could then be imported into Talent Studio, the title that Eguchi and Nogami were working on.

Talent Studio was a “virtual production studio” where players could customize avatars, give them props, and place them in dozens of wacky animated scenarios reminiscent of the kind seen in popular Japanese variety shows. Its “movie-making” mode was especially strange and playful. In one sample movie, a steamy-faced man nearly runs over an old lady in his car, but with a crack of lightning, she hurls a burst of blue energy Dragon Ball Z-style at his car, sending it flying through the air. With no real “gameplay” to speak of, Talent Studio was an application focused on the joy of personal expression and goofiness rather than having any sort of concrete goal. And, like people would later say about Animal Crossing, it “sounded pretty dumb”—at least according to IGN’s Peer Schneider.8

Aside from having more powerful hardware and large storage capacity, a big part of the 64DD’s marketed appeal was its internet communication features. Primitive by today’s standards (and ultimately under-delivering on promised features), the 64DD’s Randnet was a paid, members-only online service that allowed users to surf the web, communicate, and share content from their system. So while making art, videos, and other content was the base idea of the Mario Artist series, sharing and talking about those creations with others was an integral part of the intended experience.

It was fresh from working on this odd, creatively engaging non-game concept that Eguchi returned to games. In 1999, Eguchi submitted a simple, two-page pitch titled “Proposing a Communication Field.” It was not exactly a game pitch, but a gameplay pitch—the earliest foundation of what would eventually become Animal Crossing.

“At the time I was very busy with work, and there was no way for me to play games together with my family,” recalled Eguchi in a 2008 Nintendo Game Seminar9. “Maybe there’s something we could do where someone in a similar environment to me could come home late and play, which would somehow overlap with what the kids had done.” This was the basis of his pitch: an environment where many people could occupy and permanently affect the same gameplay area. People could play “together” even if their schedules didn’t match up. The 64DD would be the perfect system for it—its internal “real-time clock” meant that they could have a persistent world10 that followed in-step with the time and date of the real world. Its comparatively high memory capacity meant that changes to that world could easily and permanently be stored and retained. It also meant they might be able to utilize the online capabilities of Randnet.

With a nod of approval to develop the project for the Nintendo 64DD, he and Nogami began to imagine what such a game could be like, and how it could use the advanced technology of the 64DD.

“We were consciously trying to create something in a new game that you couldn’t easily reduce to a single label,” said Eguchi. There was no “genre” at first. As he so eloquently put it, the youngest stage of the game was a place where multiple people could simply “do stuff and hang out.”

The concept of communication between people was the game’s biggest theme from the start, drawing on both Eguchi’s nostalgia for the community he left behind in Chiba, as well as a desire to connect more closely with people he wasn’t typically able to play with—like his wife and kids. However, “community” and “communication” are broad terms that don’t really sound much like they describe a video game, and might not be easily understood. He and Nogami felt they probably needed some “normal,” familiar gameplay elements to sell the market on a brand new idea—and those elements came from an unlikely source.

In a 2006 GDC11 talk, Eguchi showed off some of Animal Crossing’s earliest planning documents, the first of which described the game’s concept as “a multiplayer game that provides a place where players can communicate with each other and cooperate to reach common goals.” Essentially, players would need to use teamwork to accomplish their objectives. Eguchi and Nogami admitted that they didn’t necessarily want a goal-based game, but were operating on the assumption that it was a necessary draw for gamers—“communication” alone wouldn’t drive people to play.

Eguchi envisioned a powerless player, the antithesis of Nintendo’s capable heroes like Mario and Link, who would need to rely on the help of animals to accomplish tasks. For example, to retrieve something beyond a tall obstacle, he might have to play in the morning in order to find a bird who could fly over it for him. This was the first time animals had come up at all in development. Multiple players would be able to team up using their arsenal of animal friends to fight some great evil in a dungeon-crawling, RPG-like environment. “But what we really wanted,” Eguchi stressed, “was for players to be communicating, and have this communication be so enjoyable in and of itself, that they forgot about any evil bosses.”

At the time, Eguchi was playing a lot of Diablo12 with his co-workers at Nintendo. He loved the way that the game facilitated cooperation and communication: working together to fight through the dungeons, showing off cool new equipment he’d collected, and even begging his friends to return to the dungeons with him where he’d died and dropped said cool equipment. He was, in fact, “a little obsessed,” a colleague of his once told me with a smile.

Diablo’s social gameplay loop—the idea of experiencing something in the game, telling your friends about it in real life, and then experiencing something together in the game—mirrors the concept of communication that Animal Crossing meant to convey, according to Eguchi.

That’s right. Adorable, peaceful Animal Crossing was inspired by the hellish, demon-packed Diablo, and began life as a multiplayer dungeon-crawler that would use the abilities of animals to help you fight evil. What?

This was not some jotted-down-on-a-table-napkin idea, either. Animal-Assisted-Diablo was the game Eguchi and Nogami gained approval for and set to work on, setting up dungeons, designing item types, and even approaching artists and designers to begin the project. It was to use the 64DD’s internal clock for a real-time day and night cycle. It even had a world layout—four islands based on the four seasons, each filled with dungeons. The pair had even nailed down which animals would be used in the game and what skill each would have. The animals weren’t friendly neighbors to hang out with—they were simply tools to be wielded. This was, quite seriously, what we might have got instead of Animal Crossing.

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But then something major happened.

Eguchi and Nogami were told they could no longer develop their game for the 64DD. A myriad of development delays and an embarrassing lack of software with enough polish to showcase caused Nintendo to, for the first time in its history, cancel its own 1998 Space World event. By the time they returned in the summer of 1999, it seemed like most of the games originally slated for the system were going to be redesigned to run on the significantly less powerful Nintendo 64—if not axed entirely.

Suddenly, Eguchi and Nogami found themselves working with much less storage and power than the Nintendo 64DD was capable of utilizing. Change would have to be drastic: they couldn’t simply trim features or scale back a little, the hardware change demanded a complete and total overhaul. Eguchi and Nogami sat down and thought carefully about what they could do.

Going back to the core concept, the most important part of this game was that it provided a space for communication. That part had to be preserved. A standard Nintendo 64 cartridge could no longer fit four separate island areas, so perhaps it could be cut to just one. With only one island, the play area was probably too small for an adventure now, but maybe it didn’t need to be an adventure. In fact, all they really wanted out of the dungeons, the great forces of evil, and the story was a familiar and easily-understood way to entice people to actually pick up the game. Now there was no adventure, so perhaps the game needed no story. No story meant no need for an ending. Traditional video game elements were quickly falling away, and instead they established the five things they knew the game absolutely needed to have to facilitate communication:

A playing field in which the results of player actions remain

Some sort of motivation for interacting with this playing field

Game elements that become conversation material or inspire conversation

Game elements that tie players together through shared experiences

Something that entices the player to play every day

It was here that development for Animal Crossing as we know it truly began.

Scaling the game down this enormously forced Nogami and Eguchi to ask: What could a player even do in such a small environment? The first idea to stick was designing a room. If you could design your own room, wouldn’t you want to show it off to your friends?

They were right. Any time I’ve started a new town in any Animal Crossing game, the first thing I create is a coffee shop in my house. When I was young, I loved coffee. I was very fixated on appearing mature, and somehow I got it in my head that the pinnacle of maturity was drinking black coffee and hanging out at coffee shops. Naturally, then, I had to create one. If you’ve played subsequent games in the Animal Crossing series, you’re probably aware that there’s usually already a coffee shop in town, run by a rather reserved pigeon named Brewster. In the first game though, the in-home coffee shop was my own idea, and I’ve carried it on as a personal tradition in every game in the series. It was a hard thing to create back then, too—there wasn’t even a coffee cup item to use for decorating. My room had dark wood floors, a jukebox, some fancy tables, and tea sets. I was even able to hang a coffee cup pattern I designed myself on the door to my house. It took a little bit of imagination, but I was very proud of it. I took photos with my mom’s digital camera so I could show it off on the forums of AnimalCrossingCommunity.com.

“The idea of having your own room and decorating it is incredibly simple, but that’s when [Eguchi and Nogami] hit on the framework that would allow players to play the game a long time,” said Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata, who acted as the game’s Executive Producer. Decorating your home is a dynamic element that can be worked on or overhauled completely as people play through the game and discover new furniture they want to use, whether that’s creating a cozy room of wooden “cabin” furniture, or an entire construction scene, complete with traffic cones and oil drums. This led to the next step, which was determining how the rooms could be decorated and where the player might source furniture and other materials. The animals that were once mere tools in the original RPG concept were reimagined as shop owners that you could actually speak to and interact with.

Having a custom room to show off might encourage communication, but it’s not necessarily engaging. The developers needed to craft ways for players to experience the game world uniquely at different times, just as their conceptual RPG had. Among the first things formed from this was the idea of a shop that only restocked once per day. Two players on the same cartridge could not each buy the same item, so if you played later in the day, you might miss something you really wanted. At first, the developers worried this would cause arguments, but decided that the communication opportunities it opened would be appealing. A parent playing the game in the evening might have to bargain with their child for items they purchased earlier, or siblings might have to negotiate who gets to play first after school. These were the sort of “real world” communication scenarios they were after. Down the line, when the development team added the ability to catch bugs and fish, they made sure to include several that could only be caught during certain times of the day.

These ideas necessitated keeping the real-time, persistent world from the initial pitch, but without the 64DD, additional hardware—a real-time clock—would have to be built into the Nintendo 64 cartridge itself. The real-time clock is a chip, powered by an internal battery expending small amounts of energy in order to remain active for decades, even when it isn’t plugged into the system and powered on. Including the chip was an expensive undertaking. “Adding [the real-time clock] really increased the cost of the cart, and as a result, we had to keep the cart memory size down as much as possible,” explained producer Takashi Tezuka13. That smaller cartridge memory—about half of the size used by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time—forced them to get even more creative with where they could cut corners. For instance, while the Nintendo 64 is capable of displaying millions of colors, each single model in the game uses just sixteen. According to Tezuka, limiting the color palette was an intentional choice to help mitigate those memory restrictions.

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Perhaps one of the weirdest differences between Animal Crossing and other games is that the two directors purposefully designed it so that you wouldn’t get “too” into it. Instead, they wanted people to play for just a little bit each day, so that they’d still be able to get the satisfaction of playing a game without throwing their home or work-life balance out of whack. “We made it so that you’d run out of things to do if you went on and on playing,” Eguchi explained in a Nintendo Game Seminar, to which Satoru Iwata responded with a laugh: “Normally you make games that players don’t want to quit!” But the strategy made sense. How often do you decide not to buy or begin a game because you know you won’t have the time to finish it? For busy adults and kids, playing for a few minutes each day is often more realistic than spending several weeks binging. This is even reflected in the game’s original working title: Sono Higurashi, a phrase roughly meaning “living day to day.”

The changes in gameplay led them to revisit an old idea from their brainstorming sessions: targeting new demographics. Adventure games sold well among boys, but now that the adventure elements were gone, they considered how they might create a game that attracted the whole family, including “women and housewives.”

By the mid-90s, Nintendo was having a bit of a crisis. The near-monopolistic king of home video games in the 80s (in Japan and the US), Nintendo found itself getting squeezed by competitors—especially Sony, whose CD-ROM based PlayStation console was a welcome change for publishers sick of paying expensive cartridge costs and abiding by Nintendo’s strict rules.14 Some companies that had been on begrudgingly compliant terms with Nintendo jumped at the chance to develop for a platform that was not only free of Nintendo’s costly and restrictive mandates, but also backed by an enormous and wealthy company like Sony. Strong third-party support for the PlayStation meant a strong base of customers, so rather than scrabbling with Sony over the (male-skewing) “core gamer” demographic of the time, some Nintendo developers wanted to focus on creating entirely new customers for video games instead.

Targeting these “non-gamers” was easier said than done. They couldn’t just thrust a controller into the hands of people indifferent to video games, so instead the developers of Animal Crossing decided it was important to make the game enjoyable for children, but engaging and mature enough that their mothers would want to play, too.

Nintendo didn’t have a lot of female development staff15 at the time, and those they did have were mainly artists and designers—some fresh out of college. Most of them ended up working on Animal Crossing.

The team’s gender makeup was intentional. The game’s producer, Takashi Tezuka, felt that a game targeting women certainly needed the input of women, and so seven women were put on the project. Diversity of input, and diversity of ideas—that was the key to making this game resonate with a wider audience. That may seem obvious, but it’s not usually the norm in Japanese workplace culture, which tends to be more hierarchical (and at least in Nintendo’s case, male-centric).

“We were told from the very beginning that we should all be voicing our opinions as often as possible,” said Toki Iida, a new hire who began her career working on Animal Crossing’s screen and menu design. The whole office was rearranged to encourage talking and sharing ideas. Partitions were lowered so they could see everyone from their desks, and a big round table in the center offered a communal place to get feedback. “That was also where we kept all of the sweets,” she added.

In a way, the office culture surrounding the game’s development was almost like living in the world of Animal Crossing itself. Anyone could communicate with anyone, express their ideas, add their own personality, and make an impact on the finished product. “I really do feel sometimes like it was a personal project more than a business one,” Katsuya Eguchi said in an interview with Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream. “I think that sentiment is widely shared by the entire staff.”

Personal touches are everywhere throughout the game if you know where to look. Some are cut and dry, like Piroshi, the bespectacled chicken villager modeled after Nintendo’s then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi. Eguchi hints that several other villagers are modeled after Nintendo employees, and although I spent an embarrassing amount of time poring over my Dōbutsu no Mori guidebooks and trying to determine if any animals shared names or facial features with Nintendo staff members, I regret to inform you that it’s still very much a mystery “who’s who” in the world of Animal Crossing.

Some Nintendo staff are immortalized in the furniture and items. Each of the seven Kokeshi Dolls are named for Animal Crossing’s female designers—Shino-chan for sound designer Shinobu Tanaka, Toki-chan for designer Toki Iida… you get the idea. Plenty of items of furniture even came from Nintendo staff outside the design team who simply had ideas for decorations they personally wanted in the game.

“We got to create most of what we wanted,” said Eguchi in an interview with Nintendo Dream. “Each of the designers and programmers really got into it, and we let them go all out and get really detailed with what they wanted to do.” Already-established worlds like Super Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom and Zelda’s Hyrule were creatively limiting compared to working on Animal Crossing. It was built from the ground-up, and Eguchi says it “feels like a strange parallel world of our own personal lives.”

I can’t help but think this is where some of Animal Crossing’s strength comes from. The development process was, though certainly not free from the normal stresses of game development, an overall rewarding and even personal journey for those who worked on it. The collaborative nature of the project brought forth dozens of ideas that would have never been possible in a more typically Japanese structured and rigid work environment. Entire game concepts and major characters sprung from completely casual conversations.

This development style has remained fairly intact through each addition to the series. “Every morning we’d have these project meetings, but sometimes they turned into barbecues or opportunities for people to bring in sweets,” recalled series sound director Kazumi Totaka in an interview about the Nintendo 3DS game Animal Crossing: New Leaf. “It felt like the whole game just naturally came about while we were all hanging out together.” There’s such a positive attitude towards the series’ development and shared ideas, it’s no wonder that the games reflect its designers’ sense of community.

Katsuya Eguchi is often credited as “the guy who made Animal Crossing,” but he doesn’t see it that way. He feels that the enormous amount of collaboration and input from the team really makes the game an authorless piece of work…or perhaps one that has too many authors to count. “It feels like I don’t even know who created the game,” he remarked in an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu.

●

The first version of the game to ship, Japan’s Nintendo 64 Dōbutsu no Mori, was an even smaller game than the GameCube Animal Crossing ultimately seen around the world. There was no room on the meager cartridge for a town museum of fish, insects, fossils, and paintings, nor its loquacious curator Blathers. There was no rambling old mayor punctuating the holiday celebrations. But by the time Dōbutsu no Mori hit the shelves on April 14, 2001, the expanded GameCube version was already in development.16

Still, both Eguchi and Nogami were nervous about shipping the game. They knew it was fun, of course, but that was just about the only thing they had confidence in. Sure, Nintendo owns many globally recognizable characters and series, but also plenty whose existence is relegated to nothing more than a tiny cameo as a trophy in Super Smash Bros. Some of these games—like Joy Mech Fight or Doshin the Giant—were experimental. They had interesting concepts and gained a cult following, but ultimately didn’t perform well enough to get real sequels. Animal Crossing was experimental, too. Would people give such an odd game a shot? Would it be interesting enough to stick around? And, perhaps just as importantly…were people still going to buy Nintendo 64 games with the GameCube looming on the horizon?

“I wondered if [the game] really was OK up until release,” Hisashi Nogami admitted in an interview. The fears were short-lived. Although the first shipment of Dōbutsu no Mori debuted to modest sales of only about 30,000 copies in its first week, the game quickly caught fire. Reviews rolled in, and word of mouth spread far and wide: Suddenly retailers were selling out of the game and clamoring for more. “But we were switching over to GameCube development,” explained Katsuya Eguchi. “We didn’t have any N64 media left. We had to produce those [Dōbutsu no Mori] cartridges specially, because they had real-time clocks built in.” Instead of working to meet the retailers’ demands for more cartridges, they worked quickly to finish and ship the updated GameCube port Dōbutsu no Mori+.

Citing that it “would be boring” to simply ship the Nintendo 64 game as-is on a GameCube disc, Tezuka and the rest of the team managed to add dozens of new improvements to Dōbutsu no Mori+ in just six months.

Famitsu, Japan’s most popular gaming magazine, continued to cover Dōbutsu no Mori and Dōbutsu no Mori+ news nearly every issue. They gave updates and tips about the seasonal events in the game, ran interview features, and surveyed fans about their favorite parts of the game and what features and ideas they thought might come next. (Some “Haniwa Club”17 members wrote in with hopes that you’d be able to marry an animal, which…no.)

Released later that same year, Dōbutsu no Mori+ sold even better than the original. Nintendo’s official website filled up with digital “bulletin board” entries of Japanese players sharing their love of the game. Japanese toy maker Takara manufactured plushies and other merchandise, eventually producing over 50 different sets of Animal Crossing figurines. Japan was hooked.

According to Famitsu, Animal Crossing was both the eighth best-selling and the twentieth best-selling game for the GameCube in Japan, with Dōbutsu no Mori+ selling about 641,000 units, and the later Dōbutsu no Mori e+ selling about 386,000. When you combine those numbers, that makes Animal Crossing the second best-selling game on the GameCube, toppling every game except Super Smash Bros. Melee. Remember, Animal Crossing wasn’t even really a GameCube game: It was a reworked Nintendo 64 game with some added features, and some people in Japan bought it three times.18

Oh, and remember at the beginning of the book when I said there were several versions of Animal Crossing? Here’s one more: it’s from all the way forward into 2006—half a year after the release of its sequel Animal Crossing: Wild World. It’s called Dòngwù Sēnlín, or “Animal Forest,” and despite the late release, it’s no upgraded port. It’s actually several steps backwards to that original Nintendo 64 release, made for China’s iQue Player.

In 2000, China imposed a ban on video game consoles as a measure to “protect” their youth from “wasting their minds.” (Yeah, I know.) With console sales forbidden, Nintendo found the legal loophole in plug-and-play systems, establishing a China-based company called iQue. The iQue Player was essentially a shrunken Nintendo 64, but instead of individual cartridges, everything lived on a single 64MB flash card. Games released for this system, just fourteen of them, were translated into Chinese and distributed via special depots or by connecting the iQue Player to a PC, with Dòngwù Sēnlín as its final release.

For those keeping score, that makes five different versions of the same Animal Crossing. Wait, should I count the different European and Australian releases, too, with their extremely minor changes to some holidays and items? …I’m probably overthinking this.

3 The Famicom is the Japanese version of the console we know as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It released in 1983.

4 The time between the release of Super Mario World (1990) and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island (1995) was so great that Nogami claims he played Super Mario World as a college freshman. He managed to graduate college and join Nintendo in time to work on the sequel!

5 Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a small manufacturer of Hanafuda cards, a type of playing card. This was still a part of its business in 1986, and continues to be (a small part) to this day.

6 “Talent” in this context was used to describe the stars and hosts of Japanese TV programs, often doing silly and over-the-top stunts that they were not necessarily talented at.

7 Nintendo’s video game exhibition and press event that ran from 1989 to 2001. From 1989-1996 it was called “Shoshinkai.”

8 Schneider went on to give Mario Artist Talent Studio a review of 8.2/10—he actually loved it!

9 Nintendo Game Seminars were the evolution of Nintendo Dentsu Game Seminars—yearly educational events to help game design students learn from Nintendo veterans.

10 A virtual world which continues to exist and develop even when no people are interacting with it.

11 Game Developers Conference, a long-running industry conference marked by hundreds of panels, talks, and seminars from game industry professionals of all types.

12 Diablo is a multiplayer action role-playing game for the PC released in 1996 by Blizzard. It’s set in a dark fantasy world with demonic themes.

13 Takashi Tezuka is among Nintendo’s most veteran staff. Like Nogami, he graduated from Osaka University of the Arts. Sometimes called Nintendo’s “secret weapon,” Tezuka has made enormous contributions to some of Nintendo’s most popular franchises.

14 To add insult to injury, the “Play Station” was originally designed as a CD-ROM add on for the Super Nintendo system. The partnership between Sony and Nintendo fell through, and Sony went on to re-use the name and develop their own video game console.

15 In the Nintendo Dream interview this comes from, Takashi Tezuka is quick to point out that there’s “plenty of women doing regular, normal work at Nintendo,” whatever that means—just not in design/development.

16 Dōbutsu no Mori was one of the last games released for the Nintendo 64 in Japan.

17 Famitsu’s Animal Crossing fan club, named after the “Haniwa” (or “Gyroid” in the US) figures in the game.

18 Nintendo actually offered a data transfer service where you could send in your Nintendo 64 controller pak, a GameCube memory card, and ¥630 (about $5 USD) to make starting over in Dōbutsu no Mori+ a little more palatable: Your character, items, and catalog entries would be transferred to the new game. From Dōbutsu no Mori+ to Dōbutsu no Mori e+, players could transfer this data themselves.

You’re New in Town, Aren’t You?

I boot up my copy of Animal Crossing for the very first time. I am ten years old, and I have just returned from an ambitious family Christmas trip to Disney World, where I spent half of my time flipping through the game’s manual and wishing I could just go home already and be with my GameCube. I don’t know if any of my friends have this game, and I don’t know if it will live up to my expectations. All I know is that two months ago, when I saw it sitting there on the shelf of my local EB Games, I was captivated by the cover art and by the back of the box, which promised “so much to do!” It was at the top of my Christmas list, and my wish was granted.

A chipmunk-like voice squeaks “Nintendo!” as a train whistle blares. The music begins with a laid-back percussion beat followed by a jamming piano tune, while on the TV a purple-haired girl steps down from a train station and into a colorful village, pink cherry blossom petals floating through the sky. The Animal Crossing logo takes up most of the screen, and neon orange letters spelling “Press Start!” fade in and out below. I comply. The screen dissolves slowly from black to reveal a white dog coolly strumming a guitar, and for several seconds it is only him on the screen, looking down at his guitar and focusing on the music. A dialogue box pops up, and I see his name: K.K.

●

“So, you’ve decided to move out? Get your own place? See the world? That’s groovy. Who needs someone telling you what to do all the time? You can do what you want, when you want, where you want. Yeah, living on your own, being free. It feels great.”

These are the first words the game says to you. Just in this short monologue, they’ve already told you something important about the world of Animal Crossing. K.K. doesn’t mention any concrete gameplay elements like fishing or writing letters. Instead, his words explain the feeling you’ll have when you play this game: freedom.

The scene shifts to the interior of a train car, where you’re approached by a friendly but weirdly invasive cat named Rover. You can be polite or you can be rude as you answer all of his questions about your name, your destination, and how much money you have, but he takes pity on you regardless of your demeanor and calls a friend to make sure you have a place to live. When you arrive in town, you’re greeted by the closest thing to a series pariah, the snarky tanuki19 named Tom Nook, who immediately thrusts you into debt. You don’t have nearly enough Bells, the in-game currency, to afford one of his four tiny houses—but thankfully this Nook guy turns out to be a pretty decent dude and suggests you work part-time in his shop to pay off the remaining balance.

This part-time job serves as the game’s tutorial, and it’s done brilliantly. First, you navigate your new town to find Tom Nook’s shop, which is placed randomly on the map, but always in the top row of the map’s grid. You’ll find this map not in your inventory or as a menu option, but on a signboard directly north of your new house, and use it to view your town’s topography as well as the locations of various businesses and neighbors. It’s divided into “acres” on a grid, so it’s pretty easy to navigate. You make it to Nook’s shop where he has you change into a work uniform—your first time interacting with the inventory screen. Each of his errands serves a purpose: You begin contributing to your community by planting trees and flowers, meeting all of your new neighbors (even asking them if they need any errands run!), and writing and sending a letter, all of which teach you about the various forms of communication within the game. Eventually Nook runs out of work for you to do, and you’re turned loose, free to explore your new life.

When your part-time job ends, you’re still left with a bit of debt on your house, but it’s such an easily attainable amount of money that you’ll likely pay it off soon. There are absolutely no consequences if you never pay, either. Tom Nook, for all the flack he gets as the sole capitalist in your happy village, is actually the world’s most chill debt collector, and he’ll buy anything you bring him at his shop. He’ll purchase a literal bee from you and let you use that money to pay off expansions to your house. He’ll paint your roof for the price of like, four ladybugs. Your motivation for paying off debt is entirely dependent on whether or not you want a bigger house, with no pressure or wage garnishment whatsoever. Animal Crossing is having the freedom of an adult without all of that pesky soul-crushing reality: It’s like adulthood practice.

Tom Nook is one of what most fans call “Special Characters,” which are NPCs20 that appear in every town, but do not take residence there or act like the other villagers. There are several that appear in your town daily—like the dutiful police dogs Copper and Booker who never leave their post, but also never seem to really do anything other than let you pillage the Lost and Found. Pelly and Phyllis, two sisters with opposite personalities, run the 24-hour post office, caught in a pelican love triangle with the goofy mail-carrier, Pete. Blathers, a flustery owl with a tendency to fall asleep during the day, runs the town’s empty museum: It’s up to you to fill the museum with fish, bugs, dinosaur fossils, and famous paintings. He’s also one of the few special characters who doesn’t appear in the original Nintendo 64 Dōbutsu no Mori, along with the tortoise Mayor Tortimer, the seamstress hedgehogs Sable and Mable Able, a friendly ghost named Wisp, and the sea-fairing kappa21, Kapp’n.

There’s a wealth of other special characters who only show up periodically, keeping the town just lively enough that you’re tempted to check in every day. There’s always new items to purchase in the shop and new freebies to scrounge in the town dump or Lost and Found. There might be a special visitor pedaling rare carpets or telling fortunes, or maybe it’s your neighbor’s birthday, or a holiday! The thrill of not knowing what each day will hold keeps people coming back to their town day after day, sometimes for years before they grow tired of it. When I was younger and couldn’t afford more than one game every few months, Animal Crossing was a blessing—years and years’ worth of content as it encouraged me to come back every day for something different. As an adult playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS, I loved that even when I could only afford to play for fifteen minutes some days, that was enough to check in on my town and feel satisfied.

My Animal Crossing routine hasn’t changed much since I was ten. A typical day starts at Tom Nook’s shop, where I check to see if any of the furniture on sale is new to my catalog. Once I obtain a piece of furniture, it’s automatically added to my in-game catalog, most of which I can re-order as many times as I’d like—which is far more convenient than waiting around for a matching chair to come into the store. I buy out all the flowers and plant them around town, dotting the grass with sprays of pink, red, and yellow. I wander into the town’s museum to take a look at my progress and determine if it’s missing any insects or fish currently in season. Even if I’m 100% caught up, I spend some time fishing and hunting down bugs to make money—not only is it responsible to pay off a little bit of debt every day, but when I’m finally debt-free, they’ll erect a giant golden statue of me in the middle of town. (Yes, really.)

Most days I spend a good amount of time talking to my neighbors and running errands for them. Some days I’ll write them letters, or get struck by inspiration and head to the Able Sisters tailor shop to design a new pattern. I like putting my designs on signposts around town to look like advertisements or maps—little touches that I feel bring a little bit of realism to the world. At the tailor shop, I try to talk to Sable, the quiet hedgehog in the corner sewing. She’s paralyzingly shy and doesn’t want to speak until you’ve greeted her for almost a week straight, but eventually opens up to you and looks forward to your visits. The tailor shop sits near the ocean shoreline, and I stroll along the sandy beach, picking up seashells and scanning the waves for the large, oblong shadows that could indicate a rare fish lurking below the surface. On the far east corner of my town, a wooden pier juts into the water, where a dingy boat and its dingier captain await. Kapp’n shows up when the GameCube system is hooked up to a Game Boy Advance via link cable, ready to steer you across the placid ocean to a nearby tropical island, crooning sea shanties and pirate-speak all the way. This island is little more than an expansion of physical space—just one animal villager occupies the area, and there’s a small bungalow to decorate as a sort of “vacation home.” I shake the palm trees and collect fallen coconuts to plant near the beach back in town, then head back. Maybe I’ll spend some time playing Excitebike or Balloon Fight in my house.22

If it’s a Saturday, I head to the train station in the evening where I know K.K. Slider, the traveling musician from the beginning of the game, will be playing. I ask him to play me a song—today it’s a hot, jazzy, New Orleans-inspired track called “K.K. Gumbo.”

The music starts. The credits roll. Wait—the credits? Is the game over?

“There’s no official end to the game. It’s endless,” explained Takashi Tezuka in an interview. “You’re meant to play until you feel bored of it, and so we didn’t add any particular ‘ultimate goal.’ If the players can say ‘I was satisfied,’ then for us, that’s the ultimate goal.” The credits rolling during K.K.’s performance feels a little odd, knowing I’m not at all done with the game. I didn’t conquer anything or save the world, I just… lived through a pleasant day. That’s okay, though. It really was a pleasant day, and I feel like I made a positive impact on my virtual community. Perhaps that’s enough to be rewarded with some closure and great music.

19 An animal sometimes called a “Japanese raccoon dog” in the US.

20 Non-playable characters.

21 An amphibious, turtle-like creature in Japanese folklore.

22 A really innovative feature of Animal Crossing is its NES emulator: there are several rare furniture items you can find that allow you to play classic NES games.

Genre: Communication

“Communication” is one of the most broad, non-specific words in the world. It’s a terrible word that barely means anything—and I say this as someone with a college degree in Communications. If you’re talking, you’re communicating. If you’re not talking, you’re still communicating. Every game is communication: The game communicates objectives, rules, and instructions. It communicates a story, and maybe even some sort of underlying meaning within that story. As a video game player, you communicate with NPCs, or you communicate with enemies—sometimes by killing them. You communicate to your friends that you liked the game, or you read reviews on gaming media websites. It’s all communication.

Communication requires a modifier to really mean anything. I never took any “communications” classes—I took media communications, crisis communications, and workplace communications. Animal Crossing doesn’t bother to do any of that. On the corner of the box for Dōbutsu no Mori on the Nintendo 64, it just says “Communication Game,” and even producer Takashi Tezuka admits that “probably doesn’t convey very much.”

The first way a game communicates with you, assuming you haven’t already read reviews or magazine features, is what’s on the box. A lot of game boxes show dynamic screenshots and use words like “adventure,” “captivating,” and “exciting” to reel you in. It makes Animal Crossing look a bit odd by comparison. Rather than “experience the challenge of endless adventure” or “do you have what it takes?”, these are the headlines on the back of the boxes of some of the original Animal Crossing titles:

“Welcome to Town!”

“In a fun-filled village, I am happy to be with my best friends!”

“What shall I do today? Who should I mail a letter to?”

Yaaaaaaaaaaaawn. I mean, honestly. Most of these boxes literally try to sell you on the idea of writing a letter being fun. Doesn’t Nintendo know you can do that in real life? I know you can play tennis in real life or swing a sword, even—but you can do those things much better in a video game. You’re not going to be a better or more exciting letter-writer in Animal Crossing. In fact, you’ll probably be worse, because you have to type each word letter by letter with a controller23. For a so-called “communication game,” the box doesn’t exactly do a stellar job communicating why it’s fun.

The truth is that writing letters, running errands, planting trees… none of these activities are inherently fun if you remove them from their context. Animal Crossing’s appeal can’t be explained through its mechanics, and I’m not even entirely sure it can be explained using words. The most succinct thing I can point to is the game’s review in Electronic Gaming Monthly, which straight up admits that the game “sounds stupid.” They urge you to give it a chance anyway, because “once you start playing, you won’t be able to stop.”

Interacting with the game every day makes you invested in the lives of your neighbors and the livelihood of your community, but when you first begin your life in town, it won’t feel like that at all. You’re a complete newbie in an unfamiliar world. Animal Crossing only “works” if you’re a consistent participant—an active communicator in the world, doing something each day. Check in on your neighbors, attend an event, or even just catch a new bug to donate to the museum. Bit by bit, you’ll find yourself with a deep sense of belonging.

Some of Animal Crossing’s most effective communication features are only significant if you have someone else to play with, whether by sharing the same town or visiting someone else’s. This might seem like a significant oversight—after all, not everyone has someone in their lives willing to play the same games they are. Producer Takashi Tezuka even politely suggested in an interview that you shouldn’t play the game alone if you want to avoid boredom, and that there’s really nothing about the game specifically made for a single person play style. It’s not a simultaneous multiplayer game, but a game to be shared by multiple players. Even the Japanese box art says it: Hitori yori futari—“together, rather than alone.”

The dependency on having a local person or “real life” friend to play with has been fixed in subsequent games in the series, which all feature some level of online play. In 2001, when Dōbutsu no Mori on the Nintendo 64 released, reasonable options for online play were still limited, especially without the support of the 64DD24—but that doesn’t mean they hadn’t considered it for the GameCube release.
In fact, they’d thought about it quite early on: Following the Nintendo 64 game’s first public appearance at the Nintendo Space World 2000 trade show, Shigeru Miyamoto mused to Nintendo Official Magazine U.K. that they were not only planning said GameCube release, but that they even hoped to use the GameCube’s broadband adapter for online play. According to the article, Miyamoto claimed that they even considered putting some sort of Animal Crossing game on their newly announced Game Boy Mobile Adapter, a device that allowed certain games to connect to a wireless network through a cell phone—but ultimately decided that it needed a proper “complete” console version first, and the idea was never revisited. An interview in Famitsu paints a slightly different picture: Takashi Tezuka explains that he wanted to use cellphones to connect to the upcoming GameCube game, but hardware concerns left that idea unrealized. (Was Miyamoto misquoted? Was he simply thinking out loud about ideas that never had any serious consideration? Who knows!)

Animal Crossing may be billed as a game for multiple people, and some features are explicitly made for that—but that didn’t stop me from making my own fun. Right by your in-game house is a community bulletin board where you can read notices your animal neighbors wrote, or write some yourself. The developers explain this as useful for activities like advertising scavenger hunts for your friends and family who may be visiting or living in your town, or alerting them that you’re looking for certain items. With no one but me actually living in my town, I used the bulletin board as another layer of immersion to add to my in-game life. When a holiday was coming up, I’d post reminders to my animal neighbors and let them know I was looking forward to seeing them, or give them the heads up that I’d be gone for a couple of days if I knew I would be away from my GameCube. I imagined that they read those notices even though they didn’t.

Only twice did I get to experience any sort of that “Hitori yori futari” gameplay: If you knew anyone else with a copy of the game, you could use the train station in town to travel to their Animal Crossing village. It’s a fully analog endeavor, requiring two GameCube memory cards—two sets of Animal Crossing save data. With both memory cards in the system, you can travel from your town to the town on the second memory card to do as you please, meeting its residents, perusing its shop, and fishing in its rivers.

There was a kid next door to me who was the same age as my little brother—and the only other person I knew who liked Animal Crossing. So I did the only rational thing a preteen could do when deciding whether or not it was super weird to go hang out with an elementary school kid: I made it sound like it was my brother’s idea.

To be a visitor in another Animal Crossing town feels a little…eerie. It’s both comfortingly familiar and unnervingly unfamiliar. I stepped off the train to be greeted by the same rail-working monkey that bid me farewell from my own town. I almost didn’t notice that the train station itself was different—a sloping green roof frames the enormous clock in an iron archway, whereas mine is a structure of brick and stone. Because the town layouts are randomly generated, everywhere you go, things are just slightly off. The post office is in the wrong place. The bridges aren’t where you expect them to be. Tom Nook is still there in his shop, but he’s not your Tom Nook.

The kid next door, sitting behind me crunching fistfuls of goldfish crackers, has no player character there to greet me in his town. Visiting another town in Animal Crossing is a solo experience, but he’s quick to play tour guide anyways. “Make sure you go see Apollo,” he says, pointing a salty finger at the screen. “He lives over there. Oh, and my fruit trees are apples. You can take some if you want, but can you leave me some of your fruit?”

I dropped an inventory full of pears on the ground by the train station. We hadn’t arranged it beforehand, but I knew bringing some of my town’s fruit would be a nice gesture—a gift to thank my host. When you first move into your Animal Crossing town, there are a handful of fruit trees scattered around, bearing just one type of fruit. This is your “native fruit,” and you can sell them to Tom Nook at his shop for a meager amount. However, if you can find another type of fruit—either through visiting a friend’s town or through the sheer luck of receiving it as a gift in the mail—you can sell it for five times as much. The kid next door’s face lit up. “You can sell these if you want, but you should plant some of them. Then you’ll always have pears to sell,” I offered.

He wanted me to meet his favorite villager Apollo, a bald eagle wearing a tough-looking black shirt. I found him wandering around near his house, and he greeted me brusquely. He’s a little on the surly side, but eventually we hit it off talking about sports. He told me I look like someone who enjoys bowling.

The kid next door’s town was clumsy and mismanaged compared to mine. There were holes in the ground that hadn’t been filled, a few stumps of hacked-down trees poking through the grass, and furniture items just lying about in the dirt. It was the first time I realized that people might be playing the game differently than me. What was the kid next door getting out of his Animal Crossing experience? Didn’t he care about making a positive impact on his community?

Eventually, I made my way back to the train station for a one-way ride back to my own town. I can’t go explore the world or visit a random town. I can’t return to wherever I came from before moving to my village or pay a visit to my family, but that’s okay. My community is enough.

A few days later, my cat neighbor Tabby moved away and into the kid next door’s town. To be fair, she warned me she might do that someday. “Guess what!” she exclaimed, shortly after meeting me for the very first time, “When you take the train to another town… I just might follow you! It’s a free country, after all!” She’d clearly been thinking about this already. Being stuck in the same town “would be sooo super boring, right?” Tabby offered. “Don’t look all mopey! Even if I do move, it’s not like I’ll forget you, Kelsey!” She kept her word. The second time I visited the kid next door’s town, I found her new house, and she remembered me.

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While lots of people had the “intended” Animal Crossing experience with real life friends and family, I wasn’t alone in having little to none of it. I never read any of these recommendations from the games’ developers, nor did I know I was really missing out: I had plenty of fun communicating and forging relationships with my animal neighbors. Your neighbors are a diverse bunch of animal species, each living in cozy houses decorated to suit their own personal style. They spend time wandering around town, chatting with each other, mailing letters, and attending community events—just like you. At home, they’re always willing to humor a spontaneous visit (so long as they aren’t sleeping), and conversations with them are rich in dialogue, interesting, and often humorous. With time, they become friends.

I’d lived in five states by the time I first played Animal Crossing, so I was used to being new in town and making new friends. Starting over completely, I assumed, was just part of life! The villagers of Animal Crossing are quite nomadic, just like my family was growing up. In subsequent titles in the series, you may knock on your animal friend’s door one day to find their furniture replaced by piles of cardboard boxes as they pace around inside their house, musing about their next big adventure. In the original Animal Crossing, however, there’s no moving day to warn you, and losing a friend is nearly inevitable. They might not even give you advance notice. If you’re super invested and speak to them every single day, you might be able to plead your case—they may let it slip that they plan on moving, and ask for your advice. But neglecting to grill them for even just a single day can be enough to make them bounce…and you’re simply informed by letter after they’ve already packed up and skipped town.

The relatively fleeting nature of these friendships suggest that they might not really mean anything. After all, if a friend were to pick up and leave without even warning you, how good of a friend could they have possibly been? The villagers of Animal Crossing have different motivations for leaving town. Sometimes their letters suggest they simply felt like leaving, feeling no particular attachment to your village and only sent a letter as a courtesy…but oftentimes the letters are written with a profound sadness you might not expect from the bunny who insulted your outfit three days ago.

“I’m moving. There, I said it. I’d tell you where I’m going, but if you were to come visit, I… I just know I’d cry. Please forgive me for going. This is how things must be.” Geez.

Of course, we know the animals in this game aren’t real. They were programmed to say these things, and they’re not some sophisticated artificial intelligence swayed by real emotional bonds. But in the game world, where communicating is a huge part of the experience, they feel more like real friends than you’d think.

For the first games in the Animal Crossing series, the villagers are split up into six gendered personality types: Males can be “Cranky,” “Jock,” or “Lazy,” and females can be “Peppy,” “Snooty,” or “Normal.” To be described by one broad adjective suggests that they are predictable archetypes, and if you play often enough, you’ll find some truth to that, but in general these personalities are quite fleshed out. Villagers generally have clear motivations, and respond to actions, dialogue, and gifts in different ways, giving them more complexity than meets the eye. But even with these preset personalities, there are other character dimensions at work, like how they dress or decorate their house. They each have their own catchphrases, too, which may change over time on a whim. Whether it’s Cupcake passive-aggressively calling you “cutie pie” or Otis punctuating half his sentences with an uneasy “I s’pose,” these catchphrases are a part of each and every conversation you instigate, and so they become a part of how you perceive their personality.

Every villager can become a reliable friend to you, but each requires you to accept some level of character flaw. Cranky neighbors are frequently insulting and complain that you make too much noise, but they’re also full of fatherly advice and wisdom if you spend enough time with them. Peppy villagers are gossipy and have short attention spans, but they are always excited to see you. Even the least flawed villagers, the “Normal” personality type, can be airheaded and self-deprecating.

It’s oddly refreshing to know that your animal friends won’t always agree with you, or that they’ll occasionally snap at you if they’ve had a bad day. They feel far more real than your average video game NPCs, and perhaps that’s why people develop such meaningful connections with them.

That’s not to say that the conversations themselves are always realistic. The dialogue in Animal Crossing can be quite silly. “Wouldn’t it be great if snow were hot? That way I wouldn’t need my mittens to make a snowman!” Eggbert, an anxious-looking chicken muses. Another one asks me if I’ve been trying to move his furniture, and triumphantly brags that I’ll never be able to anyways, as he’s super-glued all of it to the floor.25

They’re occasionally self-aware and fourth wall break-y. “Why do trees just vanish the second they hit the ground? The stump stays there, but the tree vanishes… don’t you think it’s kind of creepy?” a neighbor questions with a shiver. “Have you ever noticed how the water level in town never changes?” another asks.

They might also occasionally mug you. Not in a threatening way, of course, but in a pushy friend way: They just simply must have that piece of furniture you’re carrying around, and before you can protest, it’s been removed from your inventory.

Between the insults and the furniture-jacking, I suppose there’s a certain level of abuse that you learn to put up with in the world of Animal Crossing. But as the tone has turned far friendlier over the years, I find that I miss the harsher, more straightforward dialogue. Later games in the series, like the Nintendo 3DS title Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Nintendo Switch Animal Crossing: New Horizons, are super wholesome, but at the cost of feeling natural. Why is everyone immediately so nice to me? Why do they simply giggle and carry on if I say something rude? It’s like interacting with a village full of customer service workers afraid to call you out on your bullshit.

“You are such an idiot!” the makeup-caked cat Olivia says to my character in the original Animal Crossing. “Just stop breathing my air and go AWAY!!” Ah, there we go. Maybe that was mean, but at least they’re being real!

You may not always mesh well with your neighbors’ personalities, and sure, they might be mean sometimes, but talking to them is worth it anyway, even if just to see what they’ll say. They sincerely care about you: If you’ve been gone a while, they will ask where you’ve been, and if you’ve been talking to them too much, they will suggest you go find something else to do. On a holiday, they always ask how you’re enjoying it, or if you plan on participating in an upcoming event. They comment on the change of seasons, and ask if you’re keeping dry when it rains. They’ll each have takes on the latest gossip in town—when the famous fashion designer Gracie comes to town, you’ll hear perspectives ranging from adoration to animosity to indifference. “I hear she drives a beautiful sports car and gives out fashion advice to everyone she meets!” exclaims one neighbor. “Someone got an outfit from her. Big deal, I say. I look fine in everything. I don’t need some fancy label,” another scoffs.

Sometimes villagers fill you in on their lives outside the observable world. Alli, my snotty, rosy-cheeked alligator neighbor tells me she’s planning a picnic with her boyfriend next week. “I thought I’d bring some ice cream sundaes and milk with us,” she says. “Only the truly sophisticated can enjoy the delicate harmony of flavors.” Puck, a chubby penguin, tells me about the time his uncle sold him a lawn chair. The dialogue isn’t infinite, and it’s not all unique to each neighbor, but it’s structured in a way that feels very real. Particular lines of dialogue are phased in and out with the changing of the seasons, proximity to events, and the villagers’ mood. There’s an element of randomness to it, too. Alli may tell you about her plans with her boyfriend again next week, but this time, she’s bringing tuna sandwiches and iced tea to their picnic. The lines are just varied enough to convince your subconscious that your neighbors, and your relationships with them, are real.

The dialogue needed to feel genuine: Co-director Katsuya Eguchi labored over this, emphasizing in an interview that the whole game would feel superficial and fake if the dialogue didn’t capture the feeling that the animals were really alive, really existed in that community, like they were “in the midst of their actual lives.” A game about communication could only be effective if the communication felt genuine. And that communication could only be enjoyable if the dialogue were interesting.

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Of course, there’s much more to do with your animal neighbors than just chatting. You can also ask them for work, which usually amounts to bringing them an item or delivering something to another animal. They’ll like you more for helping them out, and also reward you with money or an item. You can write them letters, and they’ll usually return the favor. They may also show you one of your old letters later, reminiscing about how much your friendship has grown, or show off some of your letters to anyone who visits your town. Writing letters isn’t compulsory, and these animals aren’t real, yet lots of players take the time to write something meaningful to their animal friends. But why?

“Even though I know villagers can’t actually read what you write and their responses are pre-set, I still get a weird sense of enjoyment by writing to them as if they were my actual pen pal,” says one user on the popular Animal Crossing site The Bell Tree Forums. “I talk to them like real friends,” says another user. “I really love my villagers, and it just makes me feel happy writing letters to them.”

Writing a letter is a way to purposefully participate in an otherwise fairly one-way friendship. When you speak to villagers, you’re playing a passive role, much the same as any game with NPCs. You don’t get the option to respond beyond the limits of the occasional multiple-choice question, but in a letter you can write whatever you want. The game isn’t advanced enough to fully understand and respond to your letter, but that’s not the point. Writing something meaningful is roleplay. It’s interacting with the world on a deeper level, but in a way that feels completely natural…almost like fan fiction, except contained within the bounds of the game itself.

“What’s the point of playing a game where I pretend to be friends with [my neighbors] if I’m not going to pretend to be friends with [them], you know?” says another Bell Tree Forums user. People write real letters to their neighbors because their ongoing relationships—and the roleplaying that solidifies them—are a key part of the Animal Crossing experience. Whether that roleplay takes on a more realistic tone (like writing about in-game events), a more imaginative tone (like when I pretend my house is a real coffee shop), or one of total fantasy (like the user who says they write to Peewee the gorilla as if he’s their personal hitman), it’s all a way to feel more immersed and invested in the Animal Crossing world. And it’s totally optional.

Still, no matter what you write, your neighbors are going to have something to say about it. And because they lack the super genius AI (or even a regular ol’ brain) to comprehend the sentences you’ve constructed, their responses might not make a lot of sense. In fact, sometimes they even complain that they can’t understand you or that you were speaking nonsense, even if your letters were grammatically perfect.

“Use words commonly used in everyday life to make them easy to read, and use punctuation marks and spaces!” hints Takashi Tezuka to Famitsu. My letters were perfect, but much to my frustration, I would still sometimes receive those confused responses.

“Hey! Seriously, don’t send me weird letters, OK? I mean, what in the world were you talking about? And what’s with all those big words, professor? You lost me! Good-BYE!” read a letter sent to me from my perpetually-grinning cat neighbor, Tabby, before she left me for my (real) neighbor. My totally comprehensible letter about how I’d been enjoying planting flowers by the river had confused her. Which leads to the question: What actually determines how your neighbors respond to letters? Engineer James Chambers sought to find out.

“As soon as you drop off a letter at the post office, it’s given a score. That score is determined by a series of seven different checks, labeled A through G,” he explained. It checks for punctuation and capital letters, but it’s not necessarily checking your spelling—instead it’s checking for common “trigrams,” groups of three letters, to cover as much ground as possible without adding an entire dictionary to the game. That means that plenty of real words that are simply composed of uncommon groupings of letters will knock points off your score. The word “abnormal,” for instance, contains the trigram “abn”—a grouping too uncommon to be included, so simply using this word results in a lower score! Spacing and punctuation is weighted heavily on the scoring system, but if you write too long of a sentence, the penalty is severe. If the game does not see a punctuation mark for a length of 75 characters, you receive the largest possible deduction. Letters need to be simple, with short sentences, to score well.

Of course, uncovering this system led Chambers to discover that the absolute best-scoring letter is just “A. A. A. A. A. A.” repeated. It’s not checking for nouns and verbs or any sort of “real” grammar—just proper capitalization and frequent punctuation. Therefore, “A.” is considered a complete sentence, and one letter can fit dozens of this “sentence.”

The different scores unlock different tiers of gifts that may be attached alongside the letter, so to improve your chances of getting rare, high-quality items, you should probably just send a letter full of “A. A. A. A.” to all your neighbors. That kind of defeats the whole communication, roleplay, and friendship thing I’ve been going on about, so, uh, sorry to ruin the magic.

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Sure, the friendships within Animal Crossing may be technically one-sided since your neighbors are just computer programs in sheep’s clothing (or wolf’s clothing, or penguin’s clothing…), but they’re believable enough to foster realistic social skills. It may be more game-like than having real life friends—who might be weirded out if you’re constantly asking if you can run any errands for them in exchange for an old carpet—but the basics are still there.

Relationships aren’t always transactional, but sometimes they are: This is something Animal Crossing actually reflects pretty well. Your neighbors will warm up to you just through frequent contact, but you can certainly make them even happier by offering to do them favors or communicating with them in other ways, like writing them a letter. They’ll be upset if you fail to deliver on a promise, but they won’t ever completely ignore you. Even if you treat them poorly, they’re a bit more forgiving than people in the real world, and will at least give you the courtesy of letting you know they’ve left town. The social situations in Animal Crossing don’t carry a lot of pressure—yes, because it’s just a game, but also because they’re designed that way. While your neighbors absolutely might get upset or say something rude to you, they’ll never totally give up on you. It’s impossible to do anything socially unredeemable to your neighbors, so even if you’ve spent the past three weeks hitting them in the face with a bug net, you can always patch things up and strengthen your friendship. It’s not perfectly realistic, but it may be useful “practice” for people who don’t feel confident socially. That’s intentional, too.

“Part of what we wanted to do…was show something like ‘practice’ for conversing with other actual human beings,” said Katsuya Eguchi in an interview for Nintendo Online Monthly. “Like, ‘this is how you have fun communicating!’” And if enjoying a conversation with virtual animals is the social practice test, the final exam was taking those conversations to the real world. “I hope that players talk with each other about what the animals said, what they were thinking that day, and what they did,” continued Eguchi.

For people who have trouble making friends, or are going through something difficult in their lives, these interactions can feel legitimately therapeutic—or at least they did for an unpopular tween like me. The game suggests, in ways just subtle enough to go consciously unnoticed, that you matter. Your neighbors enjoy talking to you and seeing you at events, and they notice when you’re not around. Even the little details are meaningfully constructed: They move their head to look at you as you walk by, and clap if they observe you catching a fish. You are never invisible. Your existence in the game is important—and not because the game needs you for the days to advance or the trees to grow, but because the game misses you when you’re gone.

And to reiterate: none of this works unless your animal neighbors feel like real, sentient, historied beings. None of that “cheesy dialogue you find only in video games,” as Eguchi put it. No matter how good the rest of the game was, if their communications with you didn’t feel rock solid and natural, Animal Crossing wouldn’t succeed in being a game about communication.

Your neighbors not only feel real, they make your community (and the game itself) seem bigger and realer than it actually is. They talk about events you never see, activities that aren’t part of the gameplay, and their own pasts, providing a casual “lore” that immerses you into their world. Tabby says she once snuck into Kiki’s house to play NES, and was chewed out by the cops. Midge says she’s been learning Japanese, and invites you to come over if you ever want a study buddy. Flossie reminisces about how she used to be a professional bowler, and used to “totally school” those punks who thought a girl couldn’t play. Joey tells you about his uncle who once got bit by the same type of bug you’re holding. Twirp complains about how his mom still babies him even though he’s an old man now. You’ll never see the other sides of these interactions: It’s all pre-written, partially randomized dialogue, and none of it is unique to just one neighbor…but that doesn’t matter. All of these things make you feel closer to your neighbors and the world they live in.

The world of Animal Crossing is not yours, so time does not wait for you. Your neighbors lead their own lives: The fishing tournament still happens whether or not you boot up the game. They have conversations. They lend each other items. They change their clothes. They communicate in ways far beyond the dialogue they share with you, because although they like you, communicating with you is just one part of their multifaceted lives. Sometimes you’ll witness two of your neighbors talking to each other, and then suddenly one will storm away, furious. Were you hoping to talk to them? Too bad! They’re upset right now and you’ll have to come back when they’ve calmed down. Their lives don’t revolve around your convenience: Something entirely beyond your control happened, and yet you have to deal with the consequences.

That’s a wild thing for a video game to demand of you, and quite the life lesson. Communication happens all around you, and your participation in it can only make ripples, not commands. The game literally severs your ability to communicate freely with your neighbors when they’re angry or depressed, forcing you to consider your neighbor’s boundaries and perhaps treat them with respect. That being said, the game makes no requirements on how you respond to those boundaries. You’re a communicator, too, and so while the mature response might be to let your neighbor blow off steam and return later, there’s nothing stopping you from whacking them over the head with a bug net or physically shoving them around. That’s your decision.

Communication is kind of…everything. It’s what you say. It’s your actions and reactions. It’s how you choose to present yourself physically and what you do with your time. It’s really, really hard to explain, and maybe that makes it the right word to describe Animal Crossing.

23 There actually was a GameCube keyboard controller in Japan, but to my incredible dismay, it only works with the GameCube releases of Phantasy Star.

24 The Nintendo 64DD’s Randnet internet service ran for less than two years, and was originally meant to provide online multiplayer capabilities for 64DD games. This feature never happened, but Randnet allowed players to browse the internet and share user-generated game data.

25 You can’t actually move your neighbors’ furniture, so this is a fun meta-joke about the game design.

Cute and Poisonous

The Animal Crossing series is a lot softer around the edges these days—and not just in the dialogue’s shift from insult-spiked honesty to sugary wholesomeness, but in its artistic direction, too. There’s been an unmistakable decline in…let’s call it authentic strangeness. That’s not to say it’s vanished completely: The entire premise of Animal Crossing is weird! But the tone used to be a heck of a lot stranger.

Perhaps some of the original game’s quirkiest elements were accidental, though. I was alway curious why the male avatar permanently wears a hat with horns, and the female avatar wears a cone-shaped hat like a dunce or a princess. For avatars that are meant to be at least theoretically blank canvases to imprint your own personality on, these seem like very deliberate pieces of headgear that could easily clash with one’s style. Also, they’re just kind of strange!

“[The horns] actually resulted from a design problem we were trying to solve,” explained Hisashi Nogami in an interview with Nintendo Dream. In the game’s first prototype, there was only a male playable character, but they quickly received feedback that he looked like a girl. The design team tried several potential solutions, like adding a baseball cap, but nothing looked quite right. Except horns, I guess.

Animal Crossing’s original character designs are simpler, bolder, and more stylized when compared to recent entries in the series. In the first games, the characters are kind of stumpy, with exaggerated, chibi-like heads, and their simple textures are striking and funky. They’re disproportionate, with dollish features that skew more uncanny than cute. The designs of the animal villagers haven’t changed as drastically, but now there are way more lighting effects and textures that make them look closer to “real,” like a stuffed animal. It’s not bad, but it has a little less personality.

The American press was divided on the art direction of Animal Crossing. Unveiled as a Nintendo 64 game alongside next-gen GameCube games with cutting-edge graphics like Metroid Prime, the low-resolution textures and simple 3D models in Animal Crossing looked, well…old. People were excited about pushing the envelope into actual realism, and weren’t as interested in things that looked like they belonged to the past. It was “nothing impressive” visually, according to a reporter with GameSpy. “The graphics […] while not exactly disappointing, are hardly noteworthy.” Even when Animal Crossing arrived in North America as a GameCube game with updated lighting and higher-resolution textures, it still looked pretty basic.

Basic, but timeless. It was mostly forgiven for its sin of forgoing console-generation-busting realism in favor of simplistic charm, unlike the infamous internet-wide meltdown that followed the announcement of the cutesy cell-shaded The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker a year later. “Despite the low-res textures […] Animal Crossing is actually a very pleasant game to look at,” reads the game’s review for IGN. “The vibrant colors and the cute and often humorous animal designs really make the game come to life.”

The game’s designers wanted to avoid making the graphics “too fancy,” as they put it. It was supposed to appeal to a wider variety of people, including those who weren’t as familiar with video games. Anything too complex or dark would be a turn-off for a casual audience, so the style needed to be bold, friendly, and somewhat simplistic.

The style of Animal Crossing’s world is not exactly consistent, though. There is far more realism in the fish, insects, and furniture than in the characters or the ground textures, giving the game a disjointed yet whimsical look.

The Animal Crossing team definitely wanted to keep things cute. Cute, but…with something just slightly unsettling about it. Your character has big eyes, but they’re kind of soulless and doll-like. Your face is frozen in a near-permanent smile, and your nose is a bit like a scarecrow’s. A Japanese journalist called it doku o motsu kawaii—literally “poison-y cute.”

Character designer Noriko Ikegawa may have drawn some of this inspiration from the adorably creepy 3D animated TV program Gregory Horror Show26. “That’s what I think is cute at the moment,” she remarked in an interview about the game’s design. The show, which features blocky anthropomorphic creatures often carrying axes or giant syringes, is more explicitly scary than Animal Crossing, but the chibi-like proportions, doll eyes, and bold colors evoke a similar feeling.

Some characters certainly feel weirder than others. There’s a dog villager entirely wrapped in bandages like a mummy, and a green robotic ostrich. There are also rosy-cheeked bunnies and friendly, scarf-wearing sheep. The tone is all over the place from unsettling to adorable, which keeps things interesting. Even though the villagers are only split into a handful of personality archetypes, their designs help us to project a little extra subconscious personality into them. Derwin and Joey are both ducks with identical personality types, but they look so different: Derwin has dorky glasses and a shock of messy hair, while Joey wears a sporty shirt and a sumo cloth. Even though his dialogue will end up similar to anything Joey says, Derwin somehow seems nerdier and more socially awkward. There’s just so much personality in his physical design that one can’t help but interpret it uniquely.

The variety in designs is one of the ways people seem to deeply connect with Animal Crossing. They get attached to the animal neighbors they find the cutest, or who feel like they have the most compatible personality and aesthetic. Having so many distinct characters, each with their own interesting style, helps make up for the fact that there are literally only six possible villager personalities. While there is a ton of dialogue in the game, you’ll still definitely hear your two “peppy” neighbors echo each other’s lines. They’re functionally identical except for their appearance, and yet you’ll interpret them differently.

The consequence of this is that as people naturally gravitate towards villagers they find aesthetically pleasing, they may also push away the “ugly.” Any Animal Crossing fan can tell you who their least favorite villagers are, and most of the time they’ve earned that spot because…players don’t like the way they look.

I’m not particularly a fan of pigs. I mean, I don’t hate them or anything. They’re not doing anything wrong, sitting around being pigs. Other people like pigs, so who am I to judge? If you have a pig, I’m sure it’s great and I hope it makes you very happy. Go pigs.

But this is Animal Crossing, and I do not like the pigs. There are only so many villagers you can have in your town at once, and when it comes down to it, people just don’t want to have neighbors they don’t like seeing around. Only unlike the real world, where we are (hopefully) judging our neighbors by the content of their character, in Animal Crossing we sometimes instead judge their entire worth on whether or not we enjoy what they look like.

…Kind of messed up, right? It’s not just me, though, I swear. A college professor of mine once told me she hates the goats in Animal Crossing because “they look like they’ve been punched in the face.” She does not extend this sentiment to real goats, and I presume she does not hate people in the real world who look like they’ve been punched in the face, but she just doesn’t want to see goats in her town. This is a phenomenon shared by Animal Crossing fans, and I can’t really explain it in a way that doesn’t make us sound like psychopaths.

It’s all by design, though. The team intentionally created an enormous variety of designs, aesthetics, and styles so that there would (theoretically) be something that resonates and something that conflicts with each player. Some people love the intentionally jarring designs of villagers like Rasher, the wicked scar-faced pig,27 and abhor the overly cute animals, while others prefer sticky-sweet neighbors like Bunnie, the sparkly-eyed rabbit, and can’t stand the more aggressive-looking animals. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what your preference is because you’re not in charge. Villagers you hate could move in at any time. Villagers you adore could move out. They all have just as much of a right to exist in your community as you do, and no amount of bullying them can change that. Who knows, maybe you’ll even learn to make friends with a pig.

“There are people in your real life that you like and some that you don’t like,” explained Katsuya Eguchi in an interview with Game Developer. “People look different, so all of the characters in the game are created to look different.” This wide breadth of styles not only shows off the impressive creative chops of Animal Crossing’s designers, it also accurately reflects the diverse audience playing the game.

Then again, if you look too closely at the design choices in Animal Crossing, it starts to get WEIRD. Having anthropomorphic animal neighbors is an easy enough to accept concept, even if they don’t wear pants, but I still haven’t quite figured out how to parse characters like Coco, who looks like a partially hollowed-out coconut on a rabbit’s body, or Sprocket, a robot ostrich. They seem just as sentient as any of the “real” animals and no one ever questions their autonomy, so I guess we’re meant to assume that they’re not any different. Why is it, though, that there are octopus villagers, but squids are just regular squids (that your octopus neighbors might actually request to keep in a fish tank in their house)? Why are there both bird villagers and a birdcage item that houses a much smaller, non-anthropomorphic bird?

You might even get a letter from your in-game mom expressing confusion about why you’ve “chosen to live with animals” and closing with, “Don’t they smell?” Your mom seems to think the whole situation is abnormal, but we don’t really know anything about her—all she ever does is send letters, and we never get the chance to visit her or have her visit us. Maybe she’s a weird animal racist on the wrong side of history, and anthropomorphic animals are a fully integrated part of society at large. Or maybe you’re the trailblazer, choosing to befriend animals before the rest of the human world has accepted it. I’m at least 90% sure we’re not meant to think this hard about it. …Unless we are, and crafting your own headcanon from the weirdness is yet another part of the game’s charm.

26 Gregory Horror Show would later get its own video game for the PlayStation 2 in Japan and Europe.

27 Who, at least according to a Famitsu article, is based on Katsuya Eguchi’s angry side.

Where YOU Are the Famous Fashion Designer!

There is a 735-page Japanese “guidebook” for Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer28. That’s five pages longer than James Joyce’s Ulysses, the most infamous of books that are too long to read. I have it. (The guidebook, not Ulysses.)

The first 23 pages of the guidebook are an introduction to the game and its controls: Everything else is just pages and pages of furniture, clothes, and mock room layouts. I love this book. I think this book made me understand why people love those cheesy home decorating shows. It’s a design inspiration book, but rather than being limited to trendy “open concept” kitchens, “cozy nooks,” and “man caves,” it highlights the Animal Crossing series’ strength as a place for really exploring creative freedom. Some of these rooms look like a hair salon, an overgrown jungle, or the lair of a mad scientist. There are movie sets, indoor bus stops, soccer fields, and ancient Egyptian palaces. Only a fraction of the rooms in this book look like they could be a part of someone’s real house.

For the more recent Animal Crossing titles and spin-offs, the creative possibilities have never been better. The coffee shop I struggled to make look right in my first town now has several types of hot drinks, coffee makers, signboards, and seating. The game’s item list has ballooned to a ridiculous scope, but it was already impressive from the start.

It would have been easy for the original game’s designers to just make a lot of traditional furniture. They did—there are several sets that are quite simple, like “green furniture” and black-and-gray “modern furniture”—but the designers understood from the start that the players’ creativity would go deeper than creating nice, livable spaces. In fact, normal furniture was almost an afterthought, as the designers taped wacky ideas like lunar rovers and frog-faced chairs to a whiteboard in the middle of the room. “The idea board was so funny,” recalled character designer Noriko Ikegawa. “It had no ordinary furniture at all!”

“But the important thing was, even with such silly ideas, there was a chance to express them every day. Even if [an idea] was off the wall, you’d just say it anyway,” said designer Toki Iida. “It could be surprisingly interesting, and when you get some kind of reaction, it’s easier to be talkative and keep sharing more and more ideas.”

The developers working on Animal Crossing were all encouraged to suggest whatever items they wanted. This wasn’t just limited to team members in design roles, either: Everyone could contribute, and some ideas for furniture even came from outside of the project team entirely.

“Having a large variety of furnishings was very important to us, so we didn’t have too many rejects,” co-director Katsuya Eguchi explained. The result was what seemed like an endless catalog of furniture, full of creative possibilities.
Customization is a huge motivator for players of so many different types of games. Even in single-player games there are often purchasable costume packs, while games like Fortnite make a killing off of selling virtual outfits that have no bearing on the actual gameplay. But the avatars of Animal Crossing are probably the least customizable part of the game.

When you begin your Animal Crossing journey, it’s from a first-person point of view—nearly the only time the game is ever shown from that angle.29 There’s no character customizer. Your appearance is based entirely on how you respond to your seatmate, an intrusive cat named Rover’s many questions. In the first game, there’s absolutely nothing you can change about this appearance except your clothing, so if you don’t like the face that steps off the train, you’ll have to reset and try a different set of answers. For the female avatar, if you answer everything sweetly and politely (even in the face of being asked, “You aren’t a psycho, right?”), you come out looking like a sugar-plum cupcake fairy princess doll—your avatar will have gigantic, twinkling eyes and pink hair. On the other hand, if you answer everything rudely, your avatar is given lazy, half-closed eyes, punkish blue hair, and a devil-may-care smile.

There are only eight visual outcomes for each gender, and they all have the same light skin tone. Fair enough, maybe, for a game that didn’t initially intend to be released outside of Japan, but after the first game, the decision not to include any other skin tones raised some eyebrows. Not until the spin-off games in the late 2010s, like Happy Home Designer and Pocket Camp, did any true avatar customization become available, allowing a choice of hairstyle, color, and eye shape. This was also the first time you could choose a skin color other than light, unless you count the very unsettling addition of “Mii-face30” that you could give your avatar in the games Animal Crossing: City Folk and Animal Crossing: New Leaf. (It’s exactly what it sounds like—you could replace your avatar’s cute, doll-like face with any Mii design you had saved to your device. And yes, it looked very out of place.)

It’s odd that in a game brimming with customization elements and the means to share them, your avatar was not more personalizable. I can somewhat appreciate that you can’t choose your eye shape or eye color: It’s another one of the ways the game subtly suggests that you accept your lot in life and focus on the things you can change, like your clothes and your personal surroundings. Animal Crossing avatars are quirky, disproportionate caricatures anyways—they’re not meant to look exactly like you. But shouldn’t they still approximate you? For some, the disconnect between their avatar’s pale skin and their own dark skin led them to spend extra time and effort “tanning” their character by spending time outdoors in the summer or on the island year round. Tanning in Animal Crossing is time-consuming and temporary, and yet it was the only “remedy” available in the series for over a decade.

Other types of personalization were implemented fairly quickly, though. The mandatory strange hats went away in subsequent installments of the series, replaced by a plethora of (optional) headgear and other hats. A hairdresser, the perky but blunt poodle Harriet, could be unlocked in later games to change your hairstyle and color, and then was put out of a job by a regular old mirror in Animal Crossing: New Horizons that can change your appearance on a whim, free of charge. Shoe color—and then eventually your shoe style, socks, and full outfit—could all be changed as the series moved away from the chibi-like look. Characters in newer games would have bodies long enough to show off anything from skirts with leggings to shorts and sandals.

At the very least, the clothing options in the first Animal Crossing are plentiful. There are cute fruit patterns, grungy-looking t-shirts, and cozy sweaters—all kinds of ways to change up your style. There’s also a dark spot or two, like the “Tomato Juice Shirt” that ultimately got scrubbed from overseas releases. Why? Well, aside from looking like a blood-stained white shirt, it was also apparently literally a blood-stained shirt. Designer Michiho Hayashi said so herself, speaking about her love of horror manga artist Kazuo Umezu in an interview.

Even without real character customization, you can still use clothing to express yourself and even confer status. Clothes received from the famous fashionista Gracie—a stuck-up giraffe who occasionally shows up in town to insult you and make you wash her car—are difficult to collect and therefore cool to flaunt. There’s also the option to design your own clothes at the Able Sisters tailor shop using a big pixel grid to draw. You may even find that some of your neighbors start wearing your designs, too.

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But the design and direction are so much more than just what the game looks like—it’s how you interact with it. Your play style is unique to you, and your choices matter. If you cut down a tree it won’t grow back. If you destroy flowers they’re gone forever. No one will pick up the trash you leave lying around town (although they might comment on it)—it’s your life and your responsibility. In other games, the towns you visit are little more than a backdrop frozen in time. You’ll see the same glassy-eyed NPCs wandering aimlessly back and forth on one path, never reacting even as you sprint circles around them or barge into their cookie-cutter homes. No one ever moves out or moves in, and time doesn’t pass. The problem is not that it’s not realistic, it’s that it’s not believable. A lot of games, especially at the time of Animal Crossing’s release, simply don’t succeed in making their settings feel like they really exist. They’re just a series of places you pass through on your journey—plot points rather than real towns.

That’s fine for most genres! It’s probably even the right choice for most games, in order to keep your attention focused on the story or the action, but it wouldn’t work for Animal Crossing. All of the tiny details are what make people subconsciously find their village life meaningful. It’s not a backdrop for fishing or for some plot point—it’s a living, breathing community.

That part of the game’s design expands to a more individual level, too. This isn’t SimCity, so it’s not like you can make every decision about your town or move its buildings around, but you can make a lot of changes to suit your personal style. You can paint the roof of your house pink, plant an orchard of cherry trees, and fill the town with flowers. You can also plant pitfall traps to prank your neighbors, fill your house with dinosaur bones, and design your town’s flag to look like a bleeding heart. You can make things weird, or you can make things beautiful—and your town takes on some of your personality. You’ve got a say in Animal Crossing’s design, too. You may not be the designer, but you are a designer.

Katsuya Eguchi sees customization as a motivational tool. “Customization is the key to making players want to play daily,” he said at a GDC talk. “There’s a secret behind this. Players want a feeling of satisfaction, but if we give it to them, that’s the end of it, and we’re done.” It’s a part of the game that is constantly in flux—players inch closer and closer to their customization goals by picking up new furniture and clothes, but it’s not something that can be easily finished. The goalposts shift. The internal monologue moves from “If I could just get that last piece of this furniture set, I’ll be happy,” to “If I could just get this rare wallpaper, I’ll be happy,” and beyond, making players return to the game day after day.

While this design strategy sounds manipulative, there’s nothing predatory or malicious behind it. Some games use these feelings of almost-satisfaction to trigger the player to spend money or watch ads—they give you a path to “cure” your impatience. Animal Crossing provides no fix for feeling frustrated, because it’s not something you’re meant to be able to solve. Customization is encouraged but also constrained. It’s a lot like the real world.

In Dōbutsu no Mori e+, the third and final Japanese version of the first Animal Crossing, your customization options are expanded with outdoor decorations. To add even more personality to your town, you can purchase street lamps, wind turbines, or even the stone monuments of Stonehenge. This is weirdly the most out-of-character feature in the game. Animal Crossing is about individuality, but it’s also about coexistence—you are just one member of a greater community. So what gives you the right to put a giant fountain right next to your neighbor’s house? Did you even ask them? Don’t you need a permit for that? Perhaps this feature overstepped the boundary from neighbor to “guy in charge” a little early, because it didn’t return until New Leaf on the 3DS.

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Aside from visual customization, Animal Crossing also gives you the ability to compose your own simple, 16-beat “Town Tune.” This short riff plays in several different ways any time you enter a building, talk to a villager, or interact with any instrument furniture items. Its length makes recreating a whole song impossible, but I managed to craft the beginning of the Pokémon Center theme for my town. Your neighbors actively encourage you to change it up, too. They’ll lament that it gets old hearing the same riff over and over again, and curse their own lack of musical talent.

I’ve found through my tenure in the Animal Crossing community that there are some interesting differences in how people use customization. Some players may exercise less traditional creativity, opting to use an entire series of furniture to create matching, well-decorated rooms. They may also make highly “practical” rooms, like a kitchen or a bathroom—even though the games have no mechanics that would utilize them31. Maybe designing rooms just isn’t a priority to them compared to the games’ other activities like fishing or bug-catching, or maybe there’s something satisfying about making their in-game house feel like one they could actually live in—as opposed to a house like mine that will always lack a toilet.

Then there are people who enjoy stretching the limitations of the creative freedom the game gives us. They carefully landscape the town, create their own patterns, and sometimes even have an extra account on a file just because they have so many ideas that they won’t all fit in one house. Later games further enabled this play style. On the furthest limit of the creativity spectrum, these players are the ones who design at least eight different walkway tiles and lay them down one by one across the entire town, flanked by alternating patterns of rare flowers and trees laboriously cultivated. They don’t just dress their character nicely and design a stylish room—they elevate or even transform their town into something beautiful. Their communities are precious. Their towns are creative labors of incredibly slow, patient work, and can only be shared with people if their creators can trust they will respect the space. No dropping trash, no pocketing flowers, and absolutely, positively NO RUNNING. (We’re all still scarred from that whole “grass dies when you walk on it” mechanic introduced in Animal Crossing: City Folk.)

Some inventive players flex their creative muscles through humor. They like to create things that span the range from absurdly childish to extremely adult, like a toilet facing an audience, or a room designed to look like a prison cell. And the game encourages this style of play! There are a ton of silly pieces of furniture in the game that were included very intentionally, because the team understood that silliness is fun.

“Your town becomes a reflection of your values,” said co-director Katsuya Eguchi. “It’s something that you should be proud of.” I know it sounds silly to offer “has/doesn’t have a virtual toilet” as a reflection of two different values, but in the context of the game, I’ve communicated a preference for aesthetic value over practical value. When someone shares photos of their town or invites people to visit, they are showing off a space they’ve helped curate, whether that means it’s painstakingly landscaped or practically untouched.

Customization goes a lot further than aesthetic differences. It’s not just the difference in how you’ve decked out your home or planted flowers around town—it’s how you interact with the game itself. The game gives you some suggestions for goals you can pursue, but nothing is mandatory. Nothing! The kind of game you believe Animal Crossing to be will depend entirely on how you choose to play it.

You are never required to pay off your loan, catch every fish, or dig up every fossil. Even the rewards for completing major goals are relatively minor. They don’t unlock secret gameplay or a new town, nor do they further the game in any way at all—in fact, most goals just reward you with a cool thing to show off, like a golden bug net, a bigger house, or an exclusive furniture item. That doesn’t make them pointless, it makes them voluntary. You’ll still feel a deep sense of satisfaction when you receive a reward for collecting every bug. You had to labor over the course of a year to accomplish that, likely with some real trials and heartbreaks along the way. If you accomplish this, it’s because you made a decision to. You decided that catching bugs was a good way to spend your time and that collecting them all was a gratifying goal for you to pursue while so many others have chosen not to. And that achievement will feel incredibly rewarding.

Many games have optional challenges. Sure, you don’t have to romance anyone in The Sims, but then you can’t have kids and grow your family. You don’t have to make a lot of friends, but then you won’t be able to get many jobs, or get promoted.

But in Animal Crossing, it’s not just that the challenges are optional: None of them do anything to advance the game at all. The game remains exactly the same no matter what you choose to work on. Every event still happens, and neighbors still move in and out—you only miss out on cosmetic bragging rights. If you don’t fish, you’re only missing out on fishing trophies and a gold-colored fishing rod. If you don’t pay off your loan, you’re only missing out on more space to decorate. In fact, forget advancing the game: Some of the game’s activities don’t do anything, period. The soccer balls that may pop up around town exist just for the sake of playfulness: You can’t pick them up or play a real game with them or earn a trophy. You just…kick them around for fun, or bring them to a neighbor. Pitfall traps have zero monetary value and exist just for playing silly, harmless pranks. There were even plans to have paper airplane items in the game at one point—and they wouldn’t have done anything either.

Animal Crossing offers players a world full of possibilities and the tools to translate those possibilities into personality, play, and personal satisfaction. Some players find it in careful design and tedious landscaping, preening an untidy world until it’s perfect. Others find it in completing a catalog. Some even find it in running around in a blood-stained shirt and whacking their neighbors with a bug net like a charming little psycho. Everything in Animal Crossing is a personal choice, and every choice is how you customize your experience.

28 A spin-off of the Animal Crossing series for Nintendo 3DS that focuses entirely around designing houses and other buildings for villagers.

29 The first-person mode is just for riding on trains, which you can later do when visiting other towns.

30 Mii are customizable avatars first introduced on the Nintendo Wii and are used in a variety of Nintendo games, apps, and consoles.

31 That is, until Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where eating fruit gives you superhuman strength, and using the toilet, uh, removes your fruit powers.

The View From the Treehouse

On the surface, Animal Crossing doesn’t look like the kind of game that would make its way to the West. It’s standard for a game to tone down or change cultural references in the localization process, but the original Dōbutsu no Mori is painted especially thick with Japanese elements—so much so that even its own Japanese players might not catch all the references. For example, there is an item in the game called the Static Shirt, an indigo-and-white-colored garment worn by a couple of villagers. In Japan, this item is called Kasurinafuku, or “Kasuri Clothing,” and it’s not just a simple pattern. Kasuri is a traditional Japanese textile with origins dating back to as early as the 12th century—and as you can imagine, that’s not something every Japanese Animal Crossing fan would have known about. Similarly, the Painter’s Shirt is called Shiborizonufuku, from the traditional Japanese dyeing technique shibori dating back to the 8th century. These are obscure references, so it makes sense that they were localized out completely. But this is just the tip of the indigo-dyed iceberg.

“I’ll never forget [producer Takashi Tezuka] coming to us and saying, ‘If we’re going to [sell the game outside of Japan], you guys have to change everything,’ because they had designed it so specifically for the Japanese market,’” said Leslie Swan, former localization department head at Nintendo who worked on Animal Crossing.

“When we first started working on Animal Crossing for N64, we really [...] weren’t even thinking about having it localized […] for an international market,” said Katusya Eguchi. It wasn’t just a matter of changing the names of clothing. Animal Crossing is so saturated with Japanese culture—everything from holidays to little jokes in the dialogue—that translating the text would hardly scratch the surface of the work to be done. It would be the most daunting localization project that Nintendo of America had ever taken on.

Swan, alongside other prolific localization staff like Bill Trinen and Nate Bihldorff, was a key member of the secretive division of Nintendo of America known as the Treehouse. Dozens of employees, consisting of translators, writers, marketing professionals, and even video producers, work together beyond a locked, unmarked door inside Nintendo’s US headquarters to bring games from Japan to the Western market. Everything they do is kept confidential, even to other Nintendo employees—and for good reason. Nintendo of America’s relationship with its Japanese headquarters relies heavily on confidentiality. These are the people who spend months vetting, translating, and rewriting new Nintendo games, often months before anyone else in the company knows it’s happening. There are times when the Treehouse may begin work on a game or project only for it to be canceled before it hits the public eye. The private offices and secretive nature of the division are especially important in those situations.

For a completely new franchise like Animal Crossing, keeping the work under wraps was crucial. Even though there were no plans to localize the game, Bill Trinen says a few people at Nintendo of America did at least take a peek at its development early on. “The initial reaction they got [from the US office] was, ‘Yeah, we don’t know if we’ll launch this game in North America’—a rare occurrence for a game from EAD32,” said Trinen. And so, operating on the assumption that this game would never be localized, the development team went to work on making the game specifically for the Japanese market.

“As the game got close to being done, they said, ‘Why don’t you guys take a look at this one more time?’” Trinen continued. “And they sent the version over to us.” Unexpectedly, Trinen and his colleagues in the English translation department found the game impossible to put down.

“It turned into a fight, on who could get the cartridge first every day,” recalled Trinen. With the game’s shop only restocking once each day, the first person to play would be the only one to get whatever new tool was on sale. “Whoever gets there first gets a big up over everyone else.”

Passing the cartridge around all day and chatting about their town, they decided to write an evaluation of the game that all but insisted it should be localized for the US market. “I actually came to Leslie [Swan] and said, ‘I’ll take a year, two years, myself and do this whole game. It’s that much fun,’” said Tim O’Leary, who worked on the game’s translation.

“Usually what happened was that the development team and our executive management would talk about the prospects for gaining success in the US,” explained Swan. “We would meet with the dev team to talk about what we thought needed to be done, and they would point out everything we should be aware of.” But this was different than the “easier stuff” the small team was used to, like naming Mario enemies. Much different.

“I don’t think anybody really understood how big the project was,” Swan said. She recalled sitting in a small conference room, where producer Takashi Tezuka attempted to explain. “We really didn’t develop this with the global market in mind at all,” he told her. “It’s just…everything in it is so Japanese. It’s not just a matter of translating it for the US market.”

Of course, the Nintendo 64 was nearing the end of its life cycle at this point. Nintendo of America was busy releasing the last few games they’d have a hand in—Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Mario Party 3, and Dr. Mario 64—during the spring of 2001 when Animal Crossing made its Japanese debut. Their next console, the Nintendo GameCube, had already been announced at the previous year’s Nintendo Space World trade show, so it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to localize Animal Crossing for the Nintendo 64.

Thankfully, the team in Japan was already busy bringing the game to the next console generation. “‘Why didn’t you make this for the GameCube?!’ is a complaint we heard all the time!” said Tezuka. A Japanese GameCube version, stuffed with new features, events, and characters, was already in the works by the time Dōbutsu no Mori hit the shelves.33 This updated version, Dōbutsu no Mori+, is what the Treehouse team worked with, mostly arm-in-arm with the Japanese development team. “[Dōbutsu no Mori] succeeded much more than they thought it would in Japan,” Swan said, which surely played a role in the decision to embark on such a huge localization project.

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The literal translation process didn’t start immediately. Those earliest days were earmarked as research time, as the team deliberated over what items or holidays would need to be added or removed to make a US release feel more familiar to its audience.

“There’s so much text data in [Animal Crossing] that we were brainstorming before we ever got in the files,” said Nate Bihldorff, who worked on the game’s writing and editing. He was a recent hire and felt overwhelmed by the scope of the project. “We sat in a conference room for weeks and weeks working on naming characters,” explained Swan. “We’d get these stacks and stacks of pictures, just photocopied pictures of characters and items, and we’d be like ‘okay, let’s go name furniture sets today!’”

It’s difficult to overstate just how much work this was compared to other projects. It was the project that these Treehouse staff members continue to talk about. “[Animal Crossing] is just so vividly imprinted on my brain,” said Swan. “I would look out and see my whole staff, the entire staff was dedicated to working on it at that time. Nate Bildhorff, with his hoodie up, just working like twelve hours at his keyboard.”

“Those guys just, they all worked their tails off,” she continued. “But it was a labor of love. I mean, none of us wanted to give up on it. We loved every second of it, but man, it was long hours.”

Translating a huge amount of text was one thing, as was determining which events and items would be tweaked or changed, but the final barrier was accurately communicating these changes to the development team back in Japan. The localization team was equipped with plenty of fluent Japanese speakers, but that didn’t mean communication was flawless. Adding the barbecue grill item into the game, for instance, took a few passes of back and forth between the Treehouse and the developers. The Japanese design team wasn’t familiar with Western grills or what kinds of food they typically cooked, resulting in some interesting iterations before the team reached their kebab-grilling final design.

Impactful localization is not just about translation, removing cultural references that won’t be understood, or slapping some American items into the game. Good localization means that each part of the game will have the same effect on its Japanese audience as it does on its Western audience. A great example of this is the Oyashiro, a shrine that serves as the community center where holidays and events begin in the Japanese versions of Animal Crossing. Shrines in Japan have ceremonial importance, most notably during New Year’s when nearly everyone goes to pray during their hatsumōde, or first shrine visit of the year. In rural communities much like your little village in Animal Crossing, the shrines are small, but serve a broad community purpose. Typically, shrine visitors make a small offering of five yen when they go to pray.

For Western audiences, the concept of a village shrine is alarmingly foreign. It feels ancient and oddly religious, but it’s quite normal in Japan, even for nonreligious folk. This is where a localization team steps in to determine an alternative. The shrine in Animal Crossing was replaced by a wishing well—a close Western equivalent. Wishing wells also have ancient roots, stemming from European folklore, yet still feel contemporary and commonplace. Just as shrines are still used in Japan regardless of religion, people in many Western countries still throw coins into fountains and wells as they make a wish. The intent of both locations is nearly identical—but each is more meaningful to their respective audience.

Of course, many things were completely stripped of their context in the localization process, but that doesn’t necessarily make them bad. Several clothing items, like those named for ancient dyeing techniques, received more approachable names, no longer containing any sort of ancient cultural reference. The okiagari-koboshi is a traditional Japanese doll dating back to the 14th century. It’s a wobbling toy, its weight distributed so that it returns to its upright position if knocked over; it’s considered a symbol of resilience. In Animal Crossing, the small pink doll became “Wobbelina”—a fitting but culturally meaningless name.

For some reason, all seven of the kokeshi doll items were renamed: Initially representing the female designers who worked on Animal Crossing, they were changed to names that are presumably Nintendo of America staff instead. The “Maki Figurine” is likely to be translator Maki Yamane, the “Yoko Figurine” could be Yoko Yamauchi, one of the founding employees of Nintendo of America, and so on. Unless you possess extensive knowledge of the names of Nintendo employees, it makes no difference if they are named for the game’s female designers or for assorted Nintendo of America employees. It’s an inside joke either way.

Surely one of the biggest changes to Animal Crossing in its localization is its holidays. Holidays like Children’s Day34 hold no meaning to a Western audience, and Groundhog Day and April Fool’s Day aren’t celebrated in Japan. Even for holidays that both cultures share, the traditions surrounding them can be quite different. In Japan, New Year’s is a time to visit Shinto shrines, purchase omikuji, a type of paper fortune at the shrine, and eat Osechi, special New Year food served in fancy boxes. In the US, we celebrate with a ton of noise, sparkling beverages, and fireworks, and declare our New Year’s resolutions. The holidays in each release of Animal Crossing reflect these cultural differences, although slivers of Japanese influence still poke through in the game’s international releases. In these versions, the fortune-telling panther Katrina replaces her omikuji with fortunes from “the sunshine lottery”—which serve the same purpose, but don’t sound quite so Japanese.

Some Japanese holidays weren’t outright replaced, but were washed of any real meaning. Japan’s Children’s Day is still celebrated quietly as fish-shaped windsocks called koinobori spring up around town. As a kid who was unfamiliar with Japanese customs, I always assumed the colorful decorations to be a quirk of Animal Crossing rather than a reference to a holiday. When the windsocks appear, a post on the bulletin board reads, “Spring is upon us! Flowers and warmer temperatures are a prelude to summer fun! It makes me want to fly a kite. Or a windsock. Be on the lookout for one!” The windsocks just kind of…show up. No mention of their origin.

Several villagers received cosmetic changes alongside their name changes—often little things, like fur color or eye shape—but I can safely attribute to localization only one. Jane, a gorilla villager likely inspired by ganguro35 fashion, shared some unfortunate similarities to blackface or “darky” iconography. Her design was entirely overhauled for Western releases, given pink skin instead of dark brown, and smaller, pinker lips. Then she disappeared forever, never to appear in another Animal Crossing game.36

Localization also accounts for regional gender swaps in two characters. Gracie, known as Grace in Japan, is a self-described “fashion ‘it’ giraffe,” with famous designs known around the world. Heavily-makeuped and sporting a rather ostentatious getup, she is actually a he in Japan. While Nintendo hasn’t commented on the change, Legends of Localization founder Clyde Mandelin notes that “Grace” speaks in an especially effeminate manner, portrayed more or less the same way openly homosexual celebrities were portrayed in the Japanese media. The other change is in the camel character we know as Sahara, a traveling carpet salesman with feathery eyelashes who speaks in broken English. Sahara is known as Roland in Japan, and while his speech reads more “foreigner” rather than “female,” he became a lady camel in Western releases—because long eyelashes equals girl, I guess? It’s unclear if the intention of these changes was to avoid what could be considered harmful stereotypes, or to avoid the idea of having effeminate male characters altogether.

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Not everything needs to be localized, even if the context of a particular item or tradition is more meaningful to the audience of its origin. Catching bugs is a common pastime in Japan, especially among young boys, so its inclusion as a core component in Animal Crossing’s gameplay feels natural and purposeful among a Japanese audience. Catching bugs may invoke feelings of nostalgia and youthfulness in a Japanese player, but they may not in an American player. It’s a distinctly Japanese pastime that, while not as familiar to a Western audience, still makes for engaging gameplay. “There was a certain amount of desire on both [the Japanese and American] sides to leave stuff in the game that is important to Japanese society—stuff that isn’t understood the same way here,” explained Leslie Swan.

Many old-world and traditional Japanese furniture items were kept, too. Entire sets, like the Mossy Garden Theme, have been present in all Western games in the series. Featuring several tōrō, or stone lanterns of different sizes, I only saw this set as something exotic and Asian-inspired when I first discovered Animal Crossing—an aesthetic to play with rather than a reflection of Japanese culture. The rare Tanabata Palm item is based on Tanabata, or Star Festival, wherein people write wishes on colorful strips of paper and tie them to the branches of a bamboo tree. The Mochi Pestle is an instrument for pounding steamed rice into the Japanese confection mochi.

Retaining cultural references exactly as they are in Japan provides unexpected, and maybe even accidental, education. Because I had seen it in Animal Crossing, the first time I visited a Japanese garden, the stone lanterns and bamboo “deer scare” felt familiar, like a distant part of my own life rather than something entirely foreign. These items are a small window into Japanese culture that feels right at home alongside Western additions like the “backyard” set of furniture. Japan has mochi pestles, the US has, uh, lawn flamingos. Ah, culture.

Perhaps the weirdest bit of Japanese culture still heavily present in the series is the Haniwa: mysterious statues that move and make noise when placed inside one’s house. Localized as “Gyroids” for their tendency to make rhythmic gyrating dance moves, the Haniwa were conceptualized by the game’s sound team, led by Kazumi Totaka. “They wanted to create something where players could add their own little musical accent through sound effects that would sync with the background music,” explained Katsuya Eguchi in an interview. They’re a bizarre, grotesque, and yet absolutely necessary presence in Animal Crossing. Each makes awkward rhythmic motions, delivering grunts, dings, croaks, and whistles to be assembled together in an uncanny orchestra. It’s a strange playground for musical and aesthetic exploration, which fits right in with the game’s “poison-y cute” style. There’s also a seemingly sentient Haniwa that acts as your save point, wiggle-dancing right outside your front door.

Real haniwa are not musical. Hollow sculptures made of clay, most scholars agree that they were used to mark the perimeter of distinguished graves and protect the deceased from evil spirits. That being said, in Japan’s ancient Kofun and Yayoi periods, from roughly 300 BC to 538 AD when haniwa were popular, there was no writing system in place, so much of this history is speculative. In the game, you can only find them by digging them out of the ground, so there’s perhaps the dark implication that not only does your town sit atop an ancient burial ground, but also everyone is perfectly comfortable decorating their houses with grave markers.

And the rabbit hole goes deeper—literally. The rabbit villager Coco gets her name in most languages because of her strange, lifeless face that appears to be a coconut with a bowling-ball-looking face carved into it. But her Japanese name, Yayoi, makes it clear that she’s neither rabbit nor coconut—she’s a haniwa straight from the Yayoi period. Yep, you might be neighbors with a walking, talking funerary sculpture!37

Another aspect of the original game that still made it overseas for good is feng shui. With roots in China rather than Japan, feng shui is the art of placement—a pseudoscientific set of rules for arranging objects that will “harmonize” people with their environment and facilitate the “flow of energy.” Feng shui and its variations became something of a trend in Japan and the US, so including the concept seemed fitting when arranging a room is a core part of the game. The Nintendo Power official Animal Crossing guidebook has a nice little explanation about it without giving much historical or cultural explanation, in a section titled, “A Furniture Force that Rhymes with Flung Clay.” The book shows which color objects you should place on which side of your house for increased luck with money or items, and which items will bring you increased luck regardless of where you plop them down. Feng shui works—you really will find rare items more often when you put yellow furniture on the left side of your house—but it’s not explicitly encouraged in the game. Your neighbors may hint at its benefits, but ultimately, it’s another dimension of culture to play with if you choose.

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Keeping Animal Crossing’s charm and whimsy intact for every market is the crowning achievement of the localization team, who rewrote hundreds of puns to make them applicable in English. There’s a little quip for each bug or fish you catch, and some of them are pretty groan-worthy.

“I caught a bass! If I catch a drummer, maybe I’ll form a band!” the dialogue box reads as your character proudly holds up a freshly caught fish. This is a total rewrite of the pun used in Japan, which roughly translates to, “I caught a normal bass! I wonder if it’s just so-so.” Because the fish in question is simply called a “bass” in English rather than (what translates to) “normal bass” in Japanese, the pun wouldn’t work as a direct translation. That’s pretty common, as you can imagine, when dealing with wordplay for separate languages.

“When you start with something like that, from the translation side, you translate what’s written and then you leave a bunch of notes,” said Bill Trinen, speaking about preserving Animal Crossing’s humor. “So it’s like, ‘Okay, this is what it says. But this is what it really means, and it’s a pun on this, which doesn’t work in our language.’” Communicating what makes a pun work can be difficult, and not every pun hits its mark. The important thing is that the overall effect is the same, which is making sure Animal Crossing is goofy and charming throughout.

The same goes for the names of the characters, of which many are plays on words. I won’t go as far as to say they’re particularly funny, but they are definitely clever. Kaburiba, the old sow who buys and sells turnips in the game’s “stalk market,” is a masterful play on words. Kabu means both turnip and stocks, while uriba is a place (ba) where things are sold (uri). A kabu-uriba would be a place to buy turnips. Her name in North America is Joan, as in Sow Joan, a play on the US stock market index Dow Jones.

It’s worth noting that while puns and “dad humor” have a reputation in the United States for being uncool and perhaps even childish, they feature strongly in Japanese humor, due to the language’s enormous number of homonyms (like kabu meaning both “turnip” and “stock”) where the intended word is inferred through context. Because it’s so easy to practically stumble into puns like that, their use is not limited to a lame type of humor only dads enjoy. So while Bill Trinen confirmed that the game’s text is equally punny and weird in both translations, what we might read as endearingly dorky in the United States isn’t necessarily interpreted that way in Japan. That being said, the concept of “dad jokes” does still exist in Japan, it’s just reserved for the especially cheesy and groan-worthy—some of the jokes in Animal Crossing probably qualify.

After all, dorkiness is everywhere in this game. It’s in the dialogue, in descriptions—it’s ingrained in Animal Crossing’s very DNA. “Welcome to my igloo! It’s so cool to have visitors in here,” quips my duck neighbor, Joey. For every normal conversation you have with a neighbor, there’s another conversation where they joke that they should start calling you “juice,” or that they’re a little bit jealous of snails. There’s even some personal touches from the localization team if you look closely: The clumsy seagull Gulliver starts to tell a joke about a duck, a cougar, and a husky, but stops himself short of telling you what “the duck says to the husky.” This entire exchange is a reference to football rivalries between Washington State University (The Cougars), University of Washington (The Huskies), and Bill Trinen’s alma mater University of Oregon (The Ducks), of which he’s an extremely vocal fan. With dialogue like that, it’s no wonder they managed to make communicating fun, no matter what language you do it in.

32 Entertainment Analysis and Development: the division that developed Animal Crossing.

33 There’s some conflicting information about this, as Eguchi claims that the port started once they realized they couldn’t produce any more N64 cartridges. However, the file creation dates of elements first featured in Dōbutsu no Mori+ suggest that work on Dōbutsu no Mori continued in the weeks just before and after its release, before they could have possibly predicted its sales.

34 A national holiday to celebrate the happiness and personalities of children.

35 A specific Japanese fashion style in the 90s and 2000s marked by deeply tanned skin, bleached hair, and white or pastel makeup with colorful clothes.

36 From a leak of Animal Crossing source assets, another blackface-styled character was discovered, but never made it into any version of the game. “Cat13” (as they’re called in code, we don’t know what their in-game name may have been) is a dark brown cat with large exaggerated lips and thick blonde eyebrows.

37 For a more light-hearted little Easter egg, all Haniwa/Gyroids can be sold to Tom Nook at his shop for 828 bells, as “ha-ni-wa” is quite similar to how one could say 8-2-8 in Japanese.

Snow Prints and Sunburns

There is a common saying among Japanese people that Japan is the only country with four seasons, or perhaps better stated as “the only country that truly has four seasons,” as opposed to places that get winters without snow, or summers without sweltering heat.38 The four seasons are an important staple of Japanese culture, each one filled with holidays and festivals to celebrate them, and it’s no surprise Animal Crossing mirrors this.

Holidays are tricky to talk about given the fact that there are so many different versions of the first Animal Crossing—each of which was localized a little differently. Holidays like Children’s Day or the bean-throwing holiday Setsubun39 hold no meaning to a Western audience, and plenty of Western holidays are not celebrated in Japan. Even holidays that both regions share rarely look exactly the same. In the US version of Animal Crossing, some Japanese holidays were disguised or else localized to Western ones. (Then many of these new or changed holidays were imported back into Japan for Dōbutsu no Mori e+!) Finally, in the European versions of the game, there were just a few tweaks to the US holidays, like Labor Day becoming Labour Day and moving from the first Monday in September to May 1.

From the N64’s Dōbutsu no Mori to the GameCube’s Dōbutsu no Mori+, the major cultural holidays remain mostly the same, but the addition of the mayor character Tortimer provides several new events and holiday-exclusive gifts. Some holidays, especially those exclusive to the world of Animal Crossing, act as little more than an excuse to get a new piece of furniture and hear some new dialogue. What makes them feel meaningful is that you share all of these holidays, major and minor, with your neighbors. They make you pause and consider the impact each person has on the community. Officer’s Day is a time to thank the dutiful police dogs, Copper and Booker, for keeping the town so peaceful. Mayor’s Day is for celebrating good old Tortimer, who keeps the town lively with events year round. Founder’s Day, which falls fittingly on Animal Crossing’s release date, is for thanking the “forecritters” that forged the town from a “barren valley full of weeds” into a beautiful and thriving community.

As each event approaches, there’s chatter around town about it. Neighbors lend their thoughts about upcoming celebrations and remind you to attend. But Animal Crossing is set in real time, and life does not wait on you: Holidays happen regardless of your presence. Your only punishment for not attending is missing out on all the warm feelings of community and kinship. (Okay, and an in-game gift.)

Without a doubt, the Japanese seasonal markers most celebrated among players are the pink sakura (cherry) blossoms that bloom all throughout Japan in March. Hanami, or flower-viewing, is a Japanese tradition over a millennium old, celebrated every year for a few weeks while the cherry trees are in bloom. In Animal Crossing, the season only lasts a couple of days, but it’s an absolutely wonderful experience as the town’s deciduous trees turn bright pink and petals float down from the sky. Villagers gather around the town center eating picnic foods, laughing, and dancing. While a Midwesterner in the US may never see a real tree turn pink, much less experience the blizzard of petals that mark the peak of sakura season in Japan, anyone can appreciate the way their town transforms during the game’s Cherry Blossom Festival.40

Dōbutsu no Mori, the first version of the original Animal Crossing, was released on April 14, 2001, missing sakura season by a mere week. “It was really unfortunate that [the game] went on sale in Japan on that date,” Katusya Eguchi lamented in an interview. “Because of the Game Boy Advance’s release, we delayed [Animal Crossing’s] release until April, but if we had released it in March, everyone would have been able to enjoy the beautiful sakura season as their first event.”

Outside the Cherry Blossom Festival, spring in Animal Crossing is marked by bright green grass and the occasional rainy day. In Japan, the first holiday of the season is Hinamatsuri or Girls’ Day, during which you can buy Hina Ningyō, a beautiful tower of dolls to display in your house. Following that is White Day, a relatively modern Japanese holiday popularized in the 1970s, where female players receive chocolates in the mail from male villagers—sort of a reciprocal Valentine’s Day.

April Fool’s Day, introduced in the US release, is a great day to hear some new dialogue, as just about everyone around town will play a prank or make a joke: Tom Nook will advertise a (fake) 90% off sale in his store, and Blathers will tell you that the most amazing scientific discovery of all time—an actual alien life-form—was just donated to the museum. Some of your neighbors will simply tell you to have fun and to be careful of pranks, and Copper, the painfully noble police dog, urges you to beware of your neighbors’ “lies and half-truths.” The dirtiest of these tricks comes from Tortimer, who first jokingly suggests that you become the town’s mayor in his place, and then gifts you a game cartridge called “Super Tortimer”—an item that, unlike the other NES cartridges, can’t actually be played. It’s purely decorative.

Spring ends on May 31, and the most immediately noticeable change is an increase in the insects around town. Summer is an extreme season in Japan—the high temperatures and humidity can be miserable, but it’s prime time for finding enormous beetles and noisy cicadas. It’s also time to break out the parasols if you don’t want your character to get a tan.

In June, the fireflies light up the village at night, and each Sunday hosts a town-wide competition to see who can catch the largest bass. An affable beaver named Chip hosts these Fishing Tourneys, measuring the fish you catch (and devouring them afterwards). Each time you present a fish that beats your previous best record for the day, he gives you a prize, with the grand prize winner receiving a trophy in the mail. My strategy was always to stock up on bass throughout the week and store them in my basement—despite getting their butts kicked week after week, my animal neighbors somehow never caught on (or noticed that I wasn’t even fishing on Sundays.)

In early July, your neighbors gather around the pond for the Fireworks Festival. Because of the camera angle in Animal Crossing, the sky is never visible, so fireworks are instead rendered as brilliant reflections in the water. Explosions of reds, greens, blues, and purples glitter on the pond’s surface, and even the grumpiest of neighbors clap and whistle as they watch. A unique track of thunderous o-daiko drums and bamboo flutes sets the scene for celebration. While I usually run around town equipped with useful tools like my fishing rod, the Fireworks Festival is an opportunity to buy items that are entirely ornamental—colorful balloons and pinwheels. Holding a balloon does nothing, and while you’re holding it, you can’t use a shovel or catch a bug. It’s an item you buy purely to feel a little bit closer to the festival experience: a digital souvenir. It’s certainly not rare for a game to give you cosmetic accessories, and it’s not all that rare for a game to give you an item that doesn’t do much—but for a game to give you a purely cosmetic, useless item that replaces a useful item? I can’t think of many examples outside Animal Crossing.

Summer also brings weeks of morning aerobics. Rajio taisō, literally “radio exercise,” is a popular recreation in Japan. Since 1928, Japan’s national radio station has broadcast morning exercise programs that people perform in unison with family, co-workers, or fellow students. It’s less widespread today than it used to be—more of a nostalgic tradition than a daily routine for anyone but the very old and the very young—but its inclusion in the world of Animal Crossing makes for a familiar pastime to its Japanese audience and an interesting recreation to everyone else. Some of the sportier neighbors attend daily and get really fired up about encouraging you to participate. The police dog Copper leads the exercises, barking words of encouragement while you use your controller to follow the music. Unfortunately, figuring out how to participate is extremely vague41, with no controller cues on the screen to reference. There’s no penalty for not performing the moves correctly, but you do look pretty silly since most of the neighbors execute the moves in flawless unity, save for the occasional slip-up where they’ll react with frantic embarrassment.

Summer winds to a close with the meteor shower, another opportunity to watch some beautiful reflections in the pond with your community. Streaks of light blitz across the water and neighbors fix their eyes skyward. “All those shooting stars really make you feel like one tiny animal in an infinitely huge cosmos,” wizened old Tortimer remarks.

The grass and trees turn from pure greens to muted yellows, and eventually to shades of dusty pink and auburn. Autumn in Animal Crossing has some of my favorite events. In early October, if you wake up early, you may find a handful of mushrooms sprouting up around town. They sell for high prices, but your neighbors know it, too, so it’s a race to see who can find them first! At Tom Nook’s store, candy lines the shelves, preparing for Halloween at the end of the month. I’ll never forget sneaking away from my mom’s real world Halloween party to attend my town’s Halloween festivities instead. I sat on the carpet fully costumed, sticky hands gripping the GameCube controller, and ran around town seeking the pumpkin-headed visitor Jack so I could trade my digital candy for exclusive Halloween furniture.

The Harvest Festival, Animal Crossing’s culturally nonpartisan version of Thanksgiving, is…actually rather dark. At the wishing well, the neighbors gather around lavish spreads of fruit (and uh, what appears to be wine—don’t tell the ESRB), but the main course is missing! Big, garnished platters sit empty on each table, although the neighbors don’t seem to mind as they chat away about table manners, thankfulness, and good food. Wander around a bit and you’ll eventually find the reason for the empty plates: an old-fashioned turkey named Franklin cowering in fear. He explains that he was invited to the village to be the Harvest Festival’s guest of honor, but that the invitation included a still legible, half-erased word under “guest”: dish. Yeah, your goofy grandpa mayor Tortimer invited a completely sentient, civilized turkey to town to murder and eat. Okay, it’s terrifyingly dark. I can’t begin to describe the implications of this. Several neighbors of mine are walking, talking birds, looking forward to eating another walking, talking bird—but even if there was no cultured-bird-on-cultured-bird cannibalism, it would still be fifty levels of f*cked up! Is this what my mom was trying to warn me about when she sent me a letter about “choosing to live with animals”?

Don’t worry—Franklin survives. And he comes back again next year after falling for the same invitation, so maybe he’s not quite as educated as I’ve given him credit for. Tortimer, on the other hand, is clearly the most horrid, twisted villain ever for trying to murder and eat the same poor turkey every year.

Finally, it’s winter, and snow starts to fall in town. Your footsteps now make a pleasant crunching sound on the fresh snow, and lonesome snowballs spring up occasionally for you to roll into huge snowmen. Your neighbors might abandon their houses for a day to camp in sloping igloos,42 softly lit by candles and a fire cooking chowder (or bubbling blocks of yakimochi in the Japanese version). Everything is serene and lovely, and we can forget all about the narrowly-avoided nightmare that was the Harvest Festival. Towards the end of December, several holidays happen in fairly quick succession. Toy Day is a McDonald’s Happy Meal of holidays, where your character’s gender determines whether you get a super sweet model car or a plain ol’ doll. Thankfully, the very next evening, a festive reindeer named Jingle shows up to dole out exclusive furniture and reward everyone for being good citizens.

Leading up to New Year’s, the town is buzzing with excitement as neighbors reflect back on their year. As the clock ticks down to midnight, there’s an explosion of fireworks, party poppers, singing, clapping, and laughing. “Happy New Year! I’ll be counting on your friendship this year, too,” says one of my grumpiest neighbors, Lobo, in a rare moment of joy. Following a celebratory tune played around the pond, New Year’s Eve is capped off with a tender rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” the traditional New Year’s song in many English-speaking parts of the world. The song is absent from the original Japanese version of the game, but it’s become a hallmark of the New Year’s celebration in Japan, too. They call the tune “Hotaru no Hikari,” (“Glow of the Firefly”), and it’s sung each year to close out the major televised New Year special.

It’s impossible to feel in a day, a week, or even a month, but as the days pass and you realize you’ve spent the better part of a year seeing the same neighbors every day, passing by the same rocks, with the shared memories of all of these events, you’ll come to feel a deep connection to your community. There’s a sense of camaraderie and belonging that can only be built through this slow, deliberate participation in a community. Animal Crossing excels in this in a way that no other media can replicate. No other media can force you to experience community bit by seemingly inconsequential bit. Sure, there are better-written characters in books and other video games. There are incredible fleshed-out worlds with deep lore and politics. But no amount of talented writing or world-building can replace the way that time and shared experiences grow one’s attachment to a community.

Jeff, an Animal Crossing content creator who goes by “JVGS” online, has kept up with his original town for well over a decade, occasionally posting blog updates or YouTube videos about what’s happening around town. “It’s like a piece of your past that you can visit at any time,” he told me via email. “You can still visit with your old friends, and they’ll still be carrying around that letter you wrote them twelve years ago. The villagers you don’t like are still around too, like annoying family members you can’t get rid of.” Seasons change and holidays come and go, but Jeff says his town and its residents haven’t changed all that much.

But eventually, something in Jeff’s town will change, because the game’s internal clock counter stops in the year 2030. Animal Crossing keeps meticulous track of holidays, making sure things could be converted from the lunar calendar to the modern solar calendar where applicable. For instance, Tsukimi, the moon-viewing festival, traditionally falls on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese calendar. Because this calendar isn’t perfectly synchronized with modern calendars, calculations have to be made to determine what day it falls on each year. “For all that, we couldn’t create the correct correspondence tables beyond 2031,” said Katsuya Eguchi in an interview with Nintendo Dream. “That was the biggest reason to stop at 2030, but more generally, we also just wanted to stop it somewhere.”

What happens when the clock stops? In the Nintendo 64 version, the game does continue counting the years into 2031, but should you ever go into the clock settings, your town will be forcefully reverted to 2030 or earlier, marching forward in time until the cartridge’s battery runs out. In the Western release of Animal Crossing on the GameCube, the countdown ends on New Year’s Eve of 2030 and…simply reverts to January 1, 2030. You’ll be stuck in a perpetual Groundhog Year until the end of time, never moving forward, which kinda seems like the opposite of the point of Animal Crossing. You know that famous adage: Time and tide wait for no man… until the year 2030.

38 There are probably several countries and at least 20 US states that would beg to differ.

39 A ritualistic holiday to celebrate the changing of seasons and drive away any bad fortunes of the previous year.

40 The music during this event was changed between the Japanese and Western releases, though, playing a more traditional song based on Japanese folklore in the original version, and a more whimsical and sweet song overseas.

41 Participating at all was new to the GameCube releases. Although the morning aerobics were present in the Nintendo 64 version, there was no way to participate in it—you could only watch. In an interview with Famitsu, Katsuya Eguchi cites it as his favorite addition to the game.

42 Or more accurately: traditional Japanese snow domes called kamakura. In Japan, kamakuras are used in winter events and often hold shinto altars inside.

Na Me Moh, Me Mow

The first time you boot up Animal Crossing, you’re immediately introduced to the strange animal “language” of Animalese. All animals speak in a voice made up of jumbly, electronically processed sounds set to different pitches—and yet it sounds like a perfectly believable language.

“Since these are animals, there was no need to make them talk like normal humans43,” explained Taro Bando, who directed the game’s sound effects. “Maybe it wasn’t so important to know exactly what they were saying; maybe all the players needed was to know the feel and tone of what they were talking about.” Animalese mimics natural speech. There are pauses when the animal can’t quite find the words to say, and upward lilts when they ask a question. It strikes just the right chord between realistic speech and strange babbling. “That’s how we came up with their language,” Bando continues. “We actually used a unique technology that we filed a patent for!”

“I was blown away the first time I heard it. ‘Whoa, they’re really talking!’” said co-director Katsuya Eguchi in an interview. “We wanted to use something ‘sound effects-y’ for the speech, but we had no idea [the sound team] would come up with something so impressive.” All of the voicework that composes these Animalese sounds was done by “the wife of someone on the sound team,”44 and it’s simply pitched up or down for various levels of gruffness or peppiness. “They recorded 50 different sounds,” Eguchi explains. “When they’re strung together quickly like that, it sounds like speech.”

While several games, including Eguchi’s Star Fox, had used distinct synthetic noises to “voice” characters, the noises lacked the inflections and intonations to feel natural. Some games had voice samples (“It’s-a me, Mario!”) or expressive but nonverbal articulations (like the grunts, giggles, and “hyah!”s from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time), but Animalese took a more prosodic approach. It’s gibberish-adjacent, but it feels like an entire language because the rhythm and patterns share similarities to our own. You’ll likely even be able to pick out some words, especially short ones like “yes” and “good,” since the sounds are strung together programmatically based on the game’s actual text. In Animal Crossing, words are matched to basic letter sounds, so Animalese sounds different between Japanese and Western releases—the villagers are essentially speaking a strange version of English or Japanese, depending on your region!

Animalese leaves a striking first impression. This very first voice, K.K. Slider’s welcoming monologue, hints that Animal Crossing is going to be an experience equal parts strange and charming.

Taro Bando is both of these things, too. “Walking around outside recording sounds with a microphone…people might sometimes think you’re a real weirdo,” Bando says of his job, laughing. Because most of the sound effects a game like Animal Crossing needed were quite natural, ordinary sounds—things like footsteps and running water—he recorded them straight from nature. He admits there’s some awkwardness if other people are around, sometimes having to explain himself to people wondering why the heck he’s crouched in the grass with a recording device.

“Sound effects are like air,” Bando explains, echoing a similar sentiment that Shigeru Miyamoto has expressed many times. You shouldn’t notice them, but not because they’re weak. They should be so natural that it’s almost invisible. There are over 500 different sound effects in Animal Crossing, some more noticeable than others.

As the seasons change, the insects that appear both in Animal Crossing and in Japan change, too. The shrill buzzing of cicadas are loud and distracting, just as they are in real life, motivating you to either scare them away or catch them. “It was a real pain getting a recording of the cicadas,” Bando laments in a 2001 sound interview. “I actually went to the mountains in Fushimi and recorded the local insects there.” Most of the game’s sound effects probably go unnoticed, as in Bando’s air metaphor, but it’s an important layer that makes the game world feel alive. The fishing rod makes a splashing sound as it hits the water, and the bug net moves through the air with a whistling thwap! as it traps an insect. There’s an echoey heel click when your character steps on stone tile, and a knocking sound when on wood floors. In fact, Bando claims that there are at least 100 different footstep sounds in the game, which likely counts individual steps for the walk cycle on each type of terrain rather than referring to over 100 different types of surfaces characters walk on.

But like the language of Animalese, the sound details don’t always maximize realism. Some sounds border on cartoonish, like the jarring someone-slammed-their-entire-palm-on-the-piano-keys effect when a character is shocked, or the staccato chime when they have an idea. There’s a short, brightly toned string of seven notes in a minor key that you’ll somehow immediately recognize as the sound of scheming. These sounds replace the need for exaggerated facial expressions, never feeling absurd or out of place with the otherwise realistic sound design.

The realism in the ambient sounds and the exaggerated “action” or “social” sounds working together is very Animal Crossing. It’s part of the distinct personality that pops up everywhere from the visual design to the dialogue: offbeat, and yet unquestionably natural.

The game’s music falls closer to the quirky side, although it’s really pretty varied, with each of the game’s several distinct composers adding something different. The soundtrack is one of my absolute favorites—it’s timeless and easy to listen to, but full of funky surprises.

Like the other design elements of Animal Crossing, its music was a collaboration of several composers led by sound director Kazumi Totaka. One of the game’s most beloved characters, the guitar-playing dog K.K. Slider, is even modeled after him. (K.K.’s “real” name, Totakeke, has been Totaka’s nickname in real life at least as far back as 1993.45 “Totakeke” is just his name and first initial: Totaka, K.) Not only is he one of Nintendo’s most talented composers, he lives and breathes music in his life outside the company, too. You may be able to catch him at a gig jamming out a vibraphone solo with his band A Slice of Life, or performing alongside other Japanese music groups.

Side by side in an interview with Nintendo Online Monthly in 2001, Kazumi Totaka and Taro Bando are an odd pairing—like two lead characters in a sitcom. Bando, with his untamed messy rockstar hair and tanned skin, wears his button-down work shirt open to reveal a bright green graphic tee. His posture is relaxed, and he gives off a sort of “wild artist” vibe. By contrast, Totaka looks like a straight-A student at a private school. Perfectly styled, close-cropped hair and always dressed in a crisp polo or button-down, he folds his hands in his lap politely.

While they’re different, there’s a palpable respect between them as they’ve continued to work together on several Animal Crossing titles. Not just in this interview, but in several, Totaka mentions that Bando’s effects are the key to making the sound experience effective—and that they make him happier just for having heard them.

At the time of development, Totaka had composed songs for several Nintendo games, but Animal Crossing was his first project as sound director. He initially intended to lead his team to match the relaxed mood of the game with acoustic music—“but then we realized that would make things too relaxed,” he said in an interview. Instead, they arranged unusual, sometimes synthetic sounds “in an ‘acoustic’ way.” Even though he’s often credited with the game’s soundtrack, he composed only about a quarter of the game’s songs himself, instead providing direction to the other composers. Even so, the project was a lot of work—he once admitted that he was so rushed during the game’s development, he was composing songs on the train on his way to the office.

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Save for event- or location-based songs, most of the music you hear in Animal Crossing is temporal, with each hour of the day assigned its own song. The game runs in real time, so if you play at the same time every day, you’ll miss out on a lot of fantastic parts of the soundtrack. Sure, you could manually change the clock, but there’s something magical about experiencing Animal Crossing in the odd hours. Creeping into the living room at 4 a.m., the house dark and quiet enough to hear the staticky buzz of the tube TV, the music took on new depth: With the rest of the world asleep, including most of your animal neighbors, the slow drum beats and vibraphone chords of the 4 a.m. track provide the perfect background for a quiet gaming session alone.

It’s difficult to write about what makes music “work,” and even more difficult to do so without sounding pretentious. Still, I want to explain what makes some of these hourly tracks fit so perfectly without demanding that you just look them up, close your eyes, and picture the scene. (You should totally look them up, though.)

The morning breaks with the brisk and curious beat of the 8 a.m. song. It has a pattern of rising notes that feel like they’re beckoning you to step outside, as a clarinet plays a gentle melody. Morning songs like this one have just enough bustle in their tempo to make you feel like waking up, but without being jarring. All day the tunes range from folksy to jazzy to poppy, framing your day’s activities with a pleasantly strange backdrop. At 1 p.m., there’s a slow but percussive jam interrupted by perfectly timed meows and reowrs. At 6 p.m., there’s a steady-moving groove peppered with melodies whistled and marimba’d, and accented by three hits to the snare drum. At 2 a.m., the music turns to an arrangement of lurching, clumsy horns punctuated by a single-toned bell. It’s a weird song that perfectly accompanies running around a village at 2 a.m., which is to say: Why the heck are you running around a village at 2 a.m.?

In the winter, you get a special treat: soft, snowy, jingly versions of these hourly tracks. Synthesizers are replaced with pianos and echoey chimes, and sleigh bells ring where there were once snares. The songs take on a cozy, festive feel, made sweeter by the quiet crunching of snow underneath your feet as you go about your village life.

Perhaps the most unbelievable thing of all about the hourly music is that the track loops are usually less than two minutes long, and yet you won’t even notice it. Composers Kazumi Totaka and Kenta Nagata somehow crafted songs so brilliantly that they play 30 times in a row without getting on your nerves! (I even listened to the soundtrack hundreds of times during my research and writing, and I still love it.)

For some composers, ensuring that the player won’t get sick of the music means crafting an atmospheric score, with melody that shows up only occasionally, saving the most melodic music for powerful moments. Animal Crossing doesn’t shy away from melody or fade its music into the background. You can hum along with, or tap your feet to every track, and they work in small or large chunks. They’re almost hypnotic—before you know it, the hour has passed and a new piece of music starts.

Of Animal Crossing’s 200+ tracks, hourly music only accounts for 24 of them (or technically 72, including the winter and cherry blossom festival versions of each track). There are songs for most holidays, songs for rain, and even individual tracks for insanely specific scenarios: Getting chased by bees gets a different track than getting stung by bees.

Calling them all “songs” is a bit inaccurate, as many are simply short bursts of music or sound effects that don’t repeat like the hourly tracks do. When you pay off any of your debts at the post office and step outside, your character pumps their fist in the air and you hear a repetitive drumbeat and a stylized voice that seems to be yelling “Wahoo! Wahoo!” over and over again. It’s maybe five seconds of a new tune, but as soon as you press a button again, it fades and returns to the hourly music.

Kazumi Totaka and Kenta Nagata were not the only artists behind the game’s enormous soundtrack. Although the accreditation for any individual song is spotty at best, some songs are unmistakably full of individual personality. Shinobu Tanaka, the sound team’s sole female designer, wrote the music for the game’s various events. Her songs are distinct in that most of them are far less melodic, instead bursting with strange effects and chaotic ambiance that only make sense in the weird world of Animal Crossing. Some of her compositions feature traditional Japanese instruments like taiko drums, bamboo flutes, and suzu bell sticks, adding an extra layer of cultural flavor. The collaboration must have been a happy one: Tanaka married the aforementioned co-composer Kenta Nagata sometime after they worked together on this project.

Perhaps the most demanding role was given to Toru Minegishi, a determined young sound designer who had only been with the company for a couple of years. “During the development of Animal Crossing, I was in charge of composing K.K. Slider’s music,” he explained in an interview with Nintendo Power. “I needed to create more than 50 musical tracks!” Every Saturday, the prolific guitar-toting dog K.K. Slider appears at the train station to play you a single song—you can either make a request or let him choose something random. Each song is in a different genre spanning everything from technopop to folk, country to soul, rock to ska. Minegishi composed nearly all of them.

“I had no problem composing music from genres I was already familiar with, but I couldn’t create tunes from more than 50 different genres just using my imagination,” he said. “I needed to study hard and learn about a variety of music to complete the project.” Despite the difficulty of his job, the songs Minegishi delivered are impressive, very clearly communicating each genre in a way that suggests he was an expert all along. (Well, all except for the beginning of the song “DJ K.K.,” which originally featured the synth riff from 2 Unlimited’s quintessential 90s jock jam “Get Ready for This,” and had to be edited in later releases. Perhaps Minegishi didn’t do it on purpose, but considering Space Jam’s popularity in Japan, I’m guessing it wasn’t a coincidence.)

When you listen to a K.K. Slider performance on Saturdays, the songs sound a little…funny. Each of his songs have lyrics that consist of absolute nonsense Animalese sounds: “Mi mi kway kway oh oh oh! / Kway kway na mi kway-oh!” His voice is jarring and sharp, each syllable fully articulated. Occasionally he howls, or whistles just a bit off-key, as if to punctuate that this is a live performance, slightly imperfect. The songs are perfectly composed, and yet the delivery is so weird—that bit of quirkiness that gives Animal Crossing its own voice.

After each K.K. Slider performance, he gives you an “aircheck.” It’s a recording of his own music—a single track to “dig on the box back at your pad.” (Or if you don’t speak K.K. Slider’s brand of 1960s beatnik, “to listen to on your music player back at your house.”) These airchecks are instrumental versions of his warbly live songs, so they’re typically easier on the ears. The airchecks appear as simple yellow music notes in the game’s inventory, but this was actually a late cosmetic change: At the game’s first public appearance at Nintendo Space World 2000, airchecks were instead represented by the relatively short-lived media format MiniDiscs, which were especially popular in Japan.

Collecting music for your house in Animal Crossing takes time. K.K. Slider only performs on Saturday evenings, and he only gives you one aircheck to take home—so it takes even more patience to collect than furniture and other items. Once you have those airchecks, though, they’re yours to decorate with. Which song best suits the mood of each room in your house? Or what’s the best to listen to when you’re spending time indoors rearranging the furniture? It’s a small but intimate choice only you can make.

43 Memory limitations of the Nintendo 64 cartridge would have made a fully voiced script impossible anyways.

44 This comes from a Nintendo Dream interview with Katsuya Eguchi, and unfortunately he didn’t elaborate further—we have no idea whose wife!

45 K.K. Slider is technically his stage name, but it’s what everyone calls him in-game!

It’s a Lot of Fun, I Swear

At E3 2001, in a packed ballroom amidst the glitzy-gold halls of the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel, Shigeru Miyamoto lifted a Nintendo GameCube high above his head. Clapping and cheers erupted into outright screaming as the lights dimmed and the first game footage was shown: Super Smash Bros. Melee. (During which, one journalist clearly yelled, “What? Ice Climbers?!” in utter bewilderment.)46

Game after game was met with oohs and aahs, wows and whoas… until a strange game called Animal Forest popped up on screen, and was met with complete silence. The demo footage showed a female villager digging holes, chopping down a tree, and playing with a ball. That was it—five seconds later, it was over, replaced on the screen with Metroid Prime to another eruption of cheers. Dōbutsu no Mori was confirmed for a Western release, and nobody really seemed to notice.

The game was no stranger to being underestimated by journalists. When the N64 version was shown off for the first time at Nintendo Space World 2000, it was shuffled in with technologically impressive games like Metroid Prime and Luigi’s Mansion that thrilled the audience. The GameCube had just been unveiled on stage by a crew of leather-clad Japanese presenters and fog machines. Even though there were plenty of Nintendo 64 games present at the show, the big titles were sequels like Pokémon Stadium Kin Gin47 and Mario Party 3. Dōbutsu no Mori flew relatively under the radar.

That’s not to say the game was completely ignored—it got some light coverage mostly written with a tone I can only describe as polite confusion. Even a couple of American magazines offered a screenshot and a short blurb about the mysterious Japanese game we’d “probably never see”—but there was no big splash.

In the UK, there was a bit more excitement for the title. Nintendo Official Magazine U.K. gave Animal Crossing a full two-page spread in their Space World 2000 coverage, calling it “a classic in the making” and “one of Nintendo’s most important games.” However, they also incorrectly called it an “Exciting [Shigeru] Miyamoto Project”—an entirely false attribution they probably inferred from his presentation, which may have inflated their faith in the game. If journalists thought Nintendo’s most famous and accomplished developer was heading the project, it’d make sense for them to cover it extensively!

Animal Crossing’s early marketing mostly struggled to excite the press. Honestly, that was nobody’s fault. What type of game is Animal Crossing, anyways? “The reality is… you have to write the genre for the retail package labeling,” Katsuya Eguchi recalled in an interview for Nintendo Online Monthly. “We hadn’t thought about that at all…it was like, ‘What should we write? I have no idea!’”

He and his team eventually settled on the genre “Communication”—the briefest possible explanation of Animal Crossing—which was not exactly an established genre. In the West, Animal Crossing games are sometimes labeled “simulation games,” often getting grouped in with games like Natsume’s Harvest Moon48 by many journalists and fans. But even as far back as May of 2000—before the game was even announced—“communication” was being teased as the next genre for Nintendo.

When the game was unveiled that August, the official press material was bafflingly bland. Captions under screenshots were very matter-of-fact: “You can pick some fruit” and “You can fish in the sparkling river.” And who could forget the riveting PR line, “You need to buy a house from a Tanuki at the beginning of the game”? They highlighted the real-time clock feature and the ability to visit other villages, but there wasn’t really any indication that any of this would be fun.

With magazines only giving it a trickle of coverage, the burden of buzz-generating was on Nintendo. In Japan, they ran a commercial for Dōbutsu no Mori that featured a little girl and her family. She shyly walks into the kitchen and says, “I want to get a room of my own!”

“A room of your own?” the dad repeats in disbelief. “Isn’t it a bit too early for you to have your own room?” chides the mom.

“Let’s create a room of your own in Dōbutsu no Mori!” booms a narrator’s voice over footage from the game. “Furnish your rooms, dress yourself up, write a letter, even work a side job!”

The little girl looks pleased playing the game, and her dad appears behind her, wide-eyed. “May daddy live there, too?” he asks.

It’s a short but sweet commercial. In Japan, houses tend to be quite compact, without space for the children to have their own rooms, so showing off that the game would give you space of your own (and might pique your parents’ interest too) was a smart call.

Surprisingly, one of the game’s most innovative and exciting features was missing from its marketing thus far. Early Dōbutsu no Mori press had zero mention of the Famicom/NES emulator (those NES furniture items that would allow you to play real NES games)—a feature that would ultimately drive a lot of people to give the game a shot. It’s possible that it simply had not been implemented yet at Space World 2000. Nintendo reported that the game was 70% complete during the show, so perhaps it could have been a tail-end addition—but even so, I find its absence from Nintendo’s own ads and commercials strange!

When the game was finally released on April 14, 2001 in Japan, two months after initially projected, the media began warming up to it. Famitsu called it “the quiet boom that will soon become a big boom.” By June, the game had gained enough interest that they ran a multi-page feature on it, explaining the mechanics and even publishing photos of the female design staff. It certainly wasn’t Nintendo’s best-selling game, but as word spread, Animal Crossing’s sales grew, with Famitsu reporting that the most recent retail shipments of the game were selling out.

●

Back in the glitzy world of E3 2001, Nintendo was not the only company keeping game journalists busy. Microsoft revealed all the final details on the soon-to-be-released Xbox—their first foray into the console market. Sony announced lots of new titles and features for the PlayStation 2, now over a year old. And Sega, accepting defeat and bowing out of the console market, was signing publishing deals left and right, scattering their many franchises between the three console manufacturers. The flurry left little room for journalists to think about the five-second clip of Animal Crossing.

A few months after E3, Nintendo showed off Dōbutsu no Mori+ at Space World 2001. This was the updated port of the Nintendo 64 game for the GameCube, with several new features added—essentially the same game they planned to sell in the West. This time, the game received more Western coverage, but again for the wrong reasons. Perhaps because Miyamoto gave the presentation, many outlets incorrectly reported it to be his project, just as Nintendo Official Magazine U.K. had the year before. “Exclusive New Shots of Shigsy’s49 Harvest Moon Killer!” read the splash text for NGC Magazine’s coverage of the game.

Dōbutsu no Mori+ released around nine months before Animal Crossing had its North American debut, and less than a year after the release of the Nintendo 64 version. Commercials and magazines focused on its new features, while merchandising ramped up with plushies, figurines, and other goods. It was even more popular than before.

By now it was E3 2002. The GameCube had already been out for half a year, and Nintendo was focused on showing upcoming games. Finally, it was time to give a share of the spotlight to Animal Crossing. Once again inside the Biltmore Hotel, the newly promoted Satoru Iwata took the stage as president of Nintendo to introduce the title as “the true magic of Nintendo connectivity.”

He put on a video. A boy wearing a puka-shell necklace (proof you were cool in the early 2000s) explained that the game was awesome because “you can do all sorts of things that your parents won’t let you do.” Getting a job, owning a house, and planting trees were among the totally radical activities that the gel-spiked hair kid told the audience they’d be able to do in Animal Crossing. He also explained that the game ran in real time, and that you could have up to four people in your village. At this point, the commercial became a skit. His little sister showed up to play the game and he rolls his eyes. But wait! His super cool friends (one of them wearing a backwards hat) distracted her with the Game Boy Advance connector cable, showing off that you can design clothing patterns on the Game Boy Advance while someone else is playing the game on the GameCube. Then the audience saw that there would be playable NES games available in the game because mom got so distracted by Donkey Kong that she forgot to cook dinner. By the end, the skit had explained a lot of the game’s features while also eliciting some nervous laughter from the audience.

American journalists still didn’t understand Animal Crossing. “[The game] doesn’t sound like it should be any fun,” wrote Lisa Mason for Game Informer magazine. “At E3, I grilled the poor Nintendo lackey. ‘So you live? You work? Just wander around and go to fishing tournaments?’”

By the time Mason’s review of the full game was published months later, she’d changed her tune—pleading with the reader to give it a shot. “It’s a lot of fun, I swear,” she wrote. “Shockingly way more fun than it sounds.” She gave it at 9.5/10.

Review after review had the same theme: We can’t explain why it’s good. Please just try it anyway. While it may have found its footing in Japan50, when Animal Crossing finally made its way to the States, Nintendo of America’s marketing team was stumped as to how to sell it. This whole “communication” concept was brand new: There hadn’t really been any mainstream Nintendo games so devoid of action, and so they tried a different approach.

First, Nintendo of America got the game into people’s hands well before its release. Traditionally, Nintendo was (and still is) quite conservative in allowing the press early access to forthcoming games. The bright blue tester GameCube consoles that magazines and other outlets used to play pre-release games were often outfitted with a heavy lock box: rather than simply mailing a pre-release copy of their games to the media as other publishers did, a Team Nintendo member came and physically locked these discs inside the GameCube so that no pre-release games could make it out into the wild. Instead, Nintendo mailed a fully pressed, retail-ready copy of Animal Crossing to outlets a month before release. “Animal Crossing is a unique title that has to be experienced firsthand to be truly understood and appreciated,” said Nintendo of America Vice President of Sales and Marketing Peter MacDougall. That’s marketing-speak for “we have no idea how to sell this using words—let’s make people try it instead.”

But Nintendo didn’t just give the press a month-early crack at the game—they ran an online contest for consumers to receive an early copy as well. Called the “Animal Crossing Pioneer Program,” the contest tasked Nintendo fans to grab a buddy and each answer a written prompt of 50 words or less—what makes you the most worthy pioneer? 250 lucky people received a copy of the game one month before its release date, and were granted access to a private forum site to chat about their experiences and ask questions. The official wording said that winners would “work closely with Nintendo to complete game objectives, provide feedback, participate in online chats, and post comments on a pioneer-only website.”

“This helped to create a big buzz about the game on the internet,” said Joshua Sloane, one of the contest winners. He and a friend decided that they could make the most out of the low word count by writing haikus—and they were right. They received a copy of the game with the disc marked “For Promotional Use Only” about a month before its nationwide launch, and spent that time playing and sharing their experiences around the internet.

Sloane was an avid member of several online Nintendo communities, so he was vaguely aware of Animal Crossing. He had seen the tiny blurbs mentioned in US magazines as far back as its Japanese debut on the Nintendo 64, but he wasn’t really paying attention to this offbeat title. It wasn’t like the other games he played, so he wasn’t particularly excited about it.

“The Pioneer contest really turned this around,” Sloane told me. “It wasn’t very modest, but I kind of felt like we nailed our entry, so I quickly started thinking of it more like ‘What’s up with this weird game I’ll be getting early?’ and finding it to be pretty intriguing.” He sent me a link to a post from his old LiveJournal account, which simply reads “OH YEAH OH YEAH OH YEAH OH YEAH OH YEAH,” followed by a copy-pasted congratulatory message from Nintendo.

The private online portal was relatively active. Pioneer contest winners and game journalists alike shared their thoughts on the game, what cool things were happening around their towns, and traded items through the game’s password system. “It was indicated that this early player feedback could be used to improve the game,” Sloane told me. “Some people made sure to suggest lists of changes, whereas others of us realized they couldn’t mean that very seriously for a game releasing [in] only a month.”

With weeks of lead time, the contest winners successfully generated pre-release excitement throughout the internet. Sloane was a frequent poster to several video game online forums, and shared his experiences there as well as within the portal. Just the novelty of his having a game before it was released was enough to perk up some ears.

Nintendo ran another online promotion through their website, too. Called the “Deck Out Your Room Sweepstakes,” it was a chance for contestants to win a TV, a stereo, a GameCube, a Game Boy Advance, a couple controllers, and a pile of games.

While I have no idea how effective it was, my favorite of Nintendo’s marketing efforts was undoubtedly their website’s faux Animal Crossing newspaper The Crossing Guardian. The site was designed to look like a real paper, featuring several different sections of content updated regularly and complete with fashion spotlights, features “written” by the animal villagers themselves, and even advertisements—not real advertisements, but advertisements for the virtual businesses within the game itself. “Wendell’s Quality Wallpaper: All Currency Accepted* (*Fish Preferred)” read one banner ad, referencing the hungry walrus who occasionally wanders into town. Like every website in the early 2000s, it also had downloadable wallpapers and other various digital goods—but additionally served as a hub for distributing unique in-game items via codes, like Mario-themed furniture.

For those of us who treated Animal Crossing like an immersive roleplay, having a realistic newspaper added yet another layer to the game’s depth. Jamal Qutub was an artist at Second Story Interactive Studios when they got a contract from Nintendo to create a website for Animal Crossing. The newspaper layout was his team’s idea. “We pitched the idea [to Nintendo] as a way to add a lot of interactive experiences and as a fun way to present new info in the future,” he told me. “I think our thought was maybe it updates every month or so…with different stories and interactive experiences.”

The Crossing Guardian technically ran for 516 issues, although its content was recycled several times. You would think the updates would include news on the newer games in the series, but it never did. It simply jumbled up whatever pre-written content it always had from 2002 and slapped a new date and issue number on it, all the way until the site was laid to rest in 2012. Still, to pick up a digital copy of the town newspaper—as I often did when I was younger—was another fun way to immerse myself in the world of Animal Crossing.

To top it all off, Nintendo ran some amusing TV commercials to promote Animal Crossing through a series of blatant parodies of MTV’s pioneering reality TV show, The Real World.

Nintendo’s commercials at the time were on a “live action with big, elaborate costumes” kick—you may recall the iconic Super Smash Bros. commercial that had costumed Nintendo characters brawling in a field of flowers set to the sweet and upbeat song Happy Together. These commercials featured the brilliant costume design of KCL Productions. The Animal Crossing commercials begin with The Real World’s signature intro of featuring each person with a two-second clip and handwritten text of their name: “Here is the true story… of four friends picked to live in a video game. And find out what happens when they stop being themselves… and start being someone else! Animal Crossing! For Nintendo GameCube!”

The commercials star four friends, Jeff, Leslie, Kelli, and Rob—each in perfect mascot-ish costume with the big heads, weird hats and stubby proportions—hanging out and going through the relatable instances of daily life in Animal Crossing. “Nice outfit. Where’d you get it, a garbage dump?” Leslie asks. “Uh… yeah,” Kelli replies. Hey, the in-game town dump is a great place to pick up new clothes.

In another, Rob stands in front of the stereo and moves his arms in circular motions to the music: There’s no actual dancing in the game, but you can make yourself “dance” by standing next to any furniture and repeatedly mashing the A button, grabbing and un-grabbing it to move your arms in the same way. The commercials are full of these tiny in-jokes and references, so they’re a blast to revisit, but it’s hard to say whether or not they were effective in actually selling the games or just incredibly confusing for the uninitiated.

●

Despite the multifaceted, “let’s try anything” approach to the game’s marketing, media coverage of the game was brimming with inaccuracies. For a game about communication, Animal Crossing was pretty shaky when it came to communicating what it was actually like. “Like everything in Animal Crossing, there are multiple storylines depending on your course of action,” reads a review of the game in the Tampa Tribune newspaper. (“Storylines?” Did we play the same game, Tampa?) “Every action affects what happens next,” reads another from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (No, it really doesn’t!) A few newspaper reviews even bring up the nonexistent mechanic of cooking a meal.

Dozens of early reviews also mention something along the lines of “choosing where you work”—a baffling inaccuracy that I traced back to the actual press release Nintendo sent to journalists. “In Animal Crossing, you create a virtual life that plays out in a friendly village of animal neighbors,” it reads, “where your job, your house, your village and even the clothes you wear are decided only by you.”

Let’s break down just this one sentence of the press release. If we’re splitting hairs, I’m not sure I’d call the village “friendly.” It’s neutral—it’s just a village, and it’s full of animals friendly and unfriendly alike. I’ll forgive it. “Your job,” however, is the most misleading phrase in the whole press release. You have a job for about fifteen minutes. It’s the tutorial, and you don’t get to choose it. You work for Tom Nook, you run some errands for him, and then you never have a job again. You’ll probably start earning money in other ways immediately, but I don’t think it’s fair to call shaking trees and selling the fruit that falls your “job.” That implies you have a title or some level of responsibility, and all the ways of making money in Animal Crossing are rather hippy. That “your village is decided only by you” is also strange. What exactly am I deciding about the village? You can do things like plant trees and flowers and change the design of the town flag, but the landscape itself is pretty static. You can’t move the river, change the location of the police station, or tell neighbors to leave town. You have the exact amount of power a good citizen should have—this is not a dictatorship, you are not God, and most things aren’t decided “only by you.”

I get that Animal Crossing is not an easy game to explain, and I don’t envy the PR team tasked with writing this press release. Frustratingly, it really is one of those games that needs to be experienced to be understood, and I think there may have been some crossed wires when it came to describing the game in the press release.

There wasn’t a lot of confidence that the game would perform well in the United States. Not only is Animal Crossing weird, novel, and difficult to describe, but even despite its many localizations, it’s still pretty darn Japanese. This was a game originally created with only the Japanese market in mind, so some of the Nintendo staff back in Japan seemed incredulous that it would even be worth localizing in the first place. “I didn’t think [Americans] would like it!” said producer Takashi Tezuka in an interview that took place in the middle of localization. The journalist conducting the interview agreed, remarking, “There must be many things that foreigners just won’t understand. Like Haniwa (Gyroid) statues, there’s no way they’d know what those are!”

The journalist was right—we didn’t know! What he may not have realized was that it didn’t matter that we didn’t know. Whether we understood that Tom Nook is a tanuki and not a raccoon, or that we saw the fish-shaped windsocks as a symbol of Children’s Day rather than a random colorful decoration, we grew just as attached to our town: The Japanese aspects of Animal Crossing didn’t feel foreign, they just felt like part of our town’s culture. We were already wearing weird hats and living in a town full of colorful talking animals—anything we didn’t understand felt like a mere quirk of our beloved community.

As challenging as the game was to describe and market, it all worked out in the end for Animal Crossing. Getting an early copy into the hands of journalists and ambassadors worked because the best argument for the game has always been the game itself. The majority of big media outlets in the US scored it somewhere around a 90 out of 100 possible points (or their equivalent scale). IGN’s review even noted that word-of-mouth marketing is baked into the game itself. “Play this game for a few days and you’ll be hooked, and by the very design of the title, you’ll tell your friends about it,” the reviewer writes. “Having a friend who plays Animal Crossing is what makes this game so great. It’s an essential part of what the game is all about.” Reading that review, it dawned on me that the animal villagers in the game occasionally suggest that you invite a friend to town. There is actual text in the game telling you that you’ll have more fun if your friends have copies of the game, too. Genius.

Animal Crossing sold better in the US than anyone expected, reaching over one and a half million sales in the US alone. Its sales of over three million units worldwide placed it comfortably in the top ten best-selling GameCube game of all time—but it never seemed like a hit. It didn’t make the cover of a single US magazine, yet its sales rivaled every Legend of Zelda game on the system, every Metroid game, and even beat out all four Mario Party titles. Subsequent games in the series would continue this trend, outselling all three in their match-ups on Nintendo DS, Wii51, 3DS, and Switch—but it wasn’t until years into this console-after-console thrashing that game journalists would give it more serious attention.

Honestly, who can blame them? Animal Crossing is weird.

46 The characters Popo and Nana, made playable in Super Smash Bros. Melee, had not had a video game appearance since their titular 1985 release, Ice Climber.

47 Known here as Pokémon Stadium 2 but actually the third Pokémon Stadium game in Japan.

48 Harvest Moon is a popular series that combines farm simulation and dating simulation elements. The naming rights are no longer owned by the original development team, and current games in the series go by the name Story of Seasons.

49 A (truly terrible) nickname for Shigeru Miyamoto.

50 Japanese reviewers still used some of the same phrases, though! One Famitsu “impressions” columnist began by saying, “I don’t think I’m the only one who can’t convey the fun of Animal Crossing to other people.”

51 Animal Crossing: City Folk went 5-2 against the sales of these three franchises in the Wii era, or 5-3 if you count Link’s Crossbow Training as a Legend of Zelda game.

Rules are Rules, OK?

Cheating in Animal Crossing is different than in other games. With no online component, and no clear competitive goals, you might argue cheating is even ethically neutral. There are no button combos or instant-win buttons. Instead, the motivation to cheat really stems from impatience: Everything happens in real time, and real time is just too slow. The most common form of cheating is simply time traveling by changing the clock settings.

Animal Crossing has several tools that are necessary to accomplish goals and fully interact with the world. You need the shovel to dig up fossils and plant fruit trees. You need the fishing rod and bug net to catch creatures that your neighbors request and to fill the museum. You need the axe, I guess, if you ever need to cut down a tree? Maybe that one is not as important, but still—these tools only appear in the store one or two at a time, once each day. It takes a minimum of four real life days to simply acquire the tools needed to fully experience the game. That’s frustrating!

I won’t lie to you. I time travel. I time travel every single time I start up a new town, in every single Animal Crossing game where it’s possible. First, I set my clock back four days. Once I’ve done everything I feel I can do for the day, I set the clock forward 24 hours and repeat until I have all of the tools. After that, I never time travel again. The game wants you to have patience and check in every day rather than experiencing all the events it has to offer one right after another. That’s why many events are random—visitors to your town don’t show up on a schedule, so you’ll have to check in often if you’re hoping to score a rare wallpaper from the traveling artist walrus Wendell, or purchase a painting from the sketchy art dealer Redd. It’s designed that way deliberately: You can only grow meaningfully attached to your community if you put in the time week after week, month after month. The game provides plenty for you to do each day without needing to hop all over the timeline, but that doesn’t stop people from doing it.

“In the early stage of development, our thinking was more strict,” said producer Takashi Tezuka, on changing the game’s clock. “We shouldn’t allow people to do that! But, we eventually changed our minds. I can’t outright recommend it, but we designed [the game] so that it shouldn’t mess up your game if you do.” That’s not to say the game won’t punish you. Weeds will sprout in greater numbers, which hurts your town’s rating. Cockroaches may invade your home, which you must chase and squish. Your neighbors are more likely to move out, and any turnips you were saving to sell will rot. None of these consequences are reversible by setting the clock back, and in fact may become even worse. You can remove weeds and squish cockroaches, but it’s annoying to do. They’re the perfect punishments. It’s karma: You thought you could cheat to get around an inconvenience? Here are some more inconveniences for you!

Time travel, or “TT” as it’s commonly shortened to in online Animal Crossing communities, is a controversial topic. All the way back to the very first fan forums, the ethics of “TTing” have been questioned, and you risked some level of community shaming should you admit to it. Not time traveling was a badge of honor. The consensus is still mixed to this day, but ultimately it’s up to you how you want to experience your game. The game suggests through punishment that you probably shouldn’t.

But there’s another type of cheating that it takes a far firmer stance on. Resetting.

It’s rare that a game interacts with you as bluntly and as personally as Animal Crossing does. The game’s dialogue has softened significantly over the years, so it’s easy to forget just how brutally honest and introspective the first releases could be. Animal Crossing takes itself seriously, and it’s not okay with being considered “just a game.”

Nothing expresses this stance as clearly as the character Resetti, the hot-tempered mole who appears at your doorstep should you ever undo a mistake and reset your game without saving. He’s stern at first, reminding you that there’s no reset button in life, but gives you the benefit of the doubt in case it was an accident. Each subsequent time you encounter him, his lectures get longer and angrier—he berates you for being a cheater and insulting everything from your intelligence to your hygiene. Resetti is not simply a raving dick, though. Through (brutally) tough love, he offers insightful commentary about becoming a mature member of society. Seriously.

“Where’s the satisfaction in cheatin’ through life? Take everythin’ as it comes. In its own time,” the mole says to me after a few minutes of ranting. “Enjoy it all. That’s noble. That’s graceful. And it’s a whole lot easier to do in this game than it is in real life, lemme tell you!”

If you continue to cheat, Resetti’s monologues only get more cutting. By the eighth reset, his patience with the world has evaporated completely:

Let me tell you something, [name]. This ain’t about you, personally, but more about the world in general. People see somethin’ they don’t wanna see, and for whatever reason, they pretend they don’t see nothin’. People see a problem they don’t wanna deal with, and they pretend they’re too busy to be bothered. This…sort of tendency…is spreadin’ like a disease. It’s real tragic to say, but that’s the world we live in. Don’t that seem sorta…all messed up to you?

He gets angry again, and then stops, confessing that his doctor says he can’t get worked up so much anymore, rambling about his blood pressure and leg cramps. Here’s a man (mole?) at his absolute breaking point, and you drove him to this. Take his world seriously, he begs you. Respect the integrity of the game.

Resetti’s existence was born out of this insistence that the player appreciate the world and the rules of Animal Crossing and approach it as if it were real. He was added when the development team noticed that playtesters were resetting the game to change the inventory available at Tom Nook’s store52 or to avoid dealing with a mistake they had made.
“We really don’t want people to hit the reset button without saving, and we talked about perhaps having a penalty for doing so,” explains series co-director Hisashi Nogami. “But a penalty wouldn’t be fun for players, so [designer Ryuji Kobayashi] suggested, ‘Well, how about we just get angry at them?’” Lengthy, insult-filled lectures were the way Nogami and Eguchi hoped to discourage cheating, and in many respects, it worked! Resetti is scary. He’s intimidating, even. In Japan, “Resetto-San” is a street-tough, wizened jerk with an Osaka “Kansai” dialect53. One of Japan’s largest cities, Osaka sometimes has a reputation for being dangerous, rude, and full of organized crime (among positive things, too!). Resetti is the Japanese equivalent of a no-nonsense crank from the Bronx—and that’s exactly what the localization team ran with. Tim O’Leary, who wrote Resetti’s text for the North American release of Animal Crossing, recalls reading each line out loud with a thick, angry New York accent.

Resetti may be the game’s scariest character, but Eguchi feels like he’s a positive influence. “When I was making Resetti […] at the time, you could hear people in the news and media blaming games for various social problems and incidents,” he explains. “So part of the message I wanted to send with Resetti was, ‘Not every game is like that. There’s no reset button in the real world, so please live a proper life!’”

There aren’t really online forum-wars debating Resetti’s philosophy the way players debate the ethics of time travel. His arguments are so earnest and self-aware that they’re tough to refute. “I know what you’re thinkin’. Whether I hit reset or not should be up to me. After all, it’s MY Nintendo GameCube,’” he says in your first encounter. “Well, sorry. Rules are rules, OK? Know what I’m sayin’? Let’s not make a big deal out of this. End of discussion.” He anticipates your defense and shuts it down before you can get a word in.

Unlike time traveling and resetting, the final way to cheat goes essentially unpunished.In Tom Nook’s shop, you can enter three “passwords” per day to receive items. There are two ways you might know a password: The game generates a (basically) unique password to share if you want to send an item to a friend in another town; or you might see a “Universal Password” shared in a magazine like Nintendo Power. The first of these passwords are generated by using your character and town name, and your friend’s character and town name. It encrypts these names and the item to create a nonsensical password that will only work under that specific circumstance: from your name, to your friend’s name.

For example, if you want to give your friend a cool piece of furniture you think she’ll appreciate, you’ll tell Tom Nook that you’re gifting the item to this specific friend. Nook will remove the item from your inventory and spit back a long password for you to write down and hand to your friend at school the next day. Your friend will go home, enter the code at Tom Nook’s store, and receive the piece of furniture. No transfer of data took place—the game knew how to interpret this code all along, and yet it felt just like real sharing.

Animal Crossing has no online capabilities to speak of, but that didn’t stop its developers from emulating the experience of spreading kindness and sharing with your friends and family. This intricate password system offers one of many ways to give the community life. But wait a minute—none of this is cheating, right? These codes only work under specific circumstances, so they can’t be abused. That’s true… that is, unless you’re not sharing with your friend, but using a password you weren’t given.

Some items were meant to be shared this way, and had “universal” codes that were widely distributed. There were several pieces of Super Mario Bros.-themed furniture shown off in issues of Nintendo Power alongside a password that would work with any Animal Crossing file. But then the community discovered that these items were not the only ones that could be freely shared. First through basic trial and error, and eventually through reverse-engineering the way the game generates passwords, players discovered that they could make just about any item in the game into a universal code.

You can probably see why some people consider this cheating. And while free furniture might not be all that crazy, you could also enter codes for giant bags of bells, the in-game currency, to greatly speed up progress in the game. All of this was posted online, easily accessible for anyone with an internet connection.

Much like time traveling, universal codes in Animal Crossing were a hotly contested topic online. They take the pain of waiting out of the game, so you’re free to do things like skip holidays since all of the exclusive furniture could be obtained through passwords. Codes take away the satisfaction that’s only felt after a struggle, yet it’s frustrating when that struggle is just waiting rather than working towards something. Thus, an ethical dilemma.

The Animal Crossing community can be a bit strange. Especially in this early era, younger community members were often very invested in the rules of the game’s world, and wanted to make sure others respected them. (Perhaps this was Resetti’s influence.) If someone wanted to time travel, reset, and abuse universal codes, it would have literally no effect54 on anyone else. Yet the subject persisted, the community divided on whether or not people should be able to have agency beyond the game’s rules. It’s quite a heated debate to grow out of a non-competitive game.

●

The Animal Crossing community is not actually a militant, justice-driven society of Smug Internet Guys, despite this weird drama I’ve just explained. In fact, it’s partially thanks to a passionate sub-sector of the community that all of this code-generating “cheating” was ever uncovered and shared. They called themselves Project Hyrule.

Project Hyrule wanted to bring the benefits of item codes to everyone, and not yet knowing that every item had a “universal” code, they came up with a way to fake it. Each code is generated through an encryption that uses the character and town names of both the gift-giver and the gift-receiver, so their program worked like this: Create a town called Hyrule, name your character Link, and then any code posted—from Link in Hyrule to Link in Hyrule—would work, as long as you named your character and town accordingly.

The site was started by a user who went by “MK Omega,” who said he had studied the forum posts about how the trading system worked even before the game launched in the US. Once he realized it was all tied to the character and town names, he set out to create a community for sharing codes in a way that would benefit everyone. MK Omega’s Project Hyrule began its life on a free, ad-riddled message board host called EZboard, and quickly gained traction. “The funny part is, Project Hyrule was up and running great and I didn’t even have my own copy of Animal Crossing yet,” MK Omega said in a post about a year after the site launched. The EZboard site was quickly replaced by a much nicer host thanks to an early Project Hyrule fan-turned-admin, and the site was abuzz with dedicated users documenting codes for the game’s items.

Eventually, someone in the Project Hyrule community figured out that the naming scheme might not be necessary. Universal codes were out there for every item, but how could they find them? Could anyone possibly crack Nintendo’s password-generating system?

As it turned out, seventeen-year-old Ryan Holtz could. “Initially, some enterprising people [at Project Hyrule] discovered that some codes [passwords] would still work if selectively corrupted—usually just a character or two,” recounted Holtz. This is the idea Project Hyrule worked from: Perhaps with enough brute force, they could figure out how the game was encrypting and spitting out these seemingly nonsensical passwords. Community members changed one variable at a time and painstakingly recorded the results, and also tried to analyze the data set they already had with their “Link in Hyrule” system. It was a gallant attempt to literally decipher the code Animal Crossing’s developers had made.

Project Hyrule’s efforts operated on the assumption that the encryption was simple enough that a pattern could be determined with the human eye, or at least with a fairly simple program. A single layer of abstraction—with every character in the code correlating directly to some other character. If that had been true, then Project Hyrule might have successfully cracked it. “What I noticed when I looked at some of these codes is that codes looked similar, some of the codes looked different, and there was really no clear pattern between them,” said Holtz. “[Project Hyrule] was destined to fail—but their hearts were in the right place.” Seeing these kids working so earnestly at what he suspected might be a futile project, Holtz decided to strike out on his own and give it a shot.

It was quite the technical undertaking. “Ultimately, there were a number of things that just fell into place at the right time that allowed this to happen,” he explained. Part of it was Nintendo’s own oversight. Dōbutsu no Mori had been ported so quickly from the Nintendo 64 to the GameCube that the final, pressed retail discs were a little… imperfect. Nintendo likely overlooked the fact that they hadn’t properly scrubbed unnecessary (and potentially sensitive) data from the disc. Millions of copies of Animal Crossing on retail shelves contained not just the game itself, but also some of the basic instructions about the game’s inner-workings—if you knew where to look.

It was here that Holtz found what he needed to start cracking the universal codes—a linker map file, which is a complex web of data linking different game functions together. With some help from the nascent GameCube emulation community, he used a program that could “dump” and deliver the data that the GameCube was looking at when running Animal Crossing. The GameCube emulator project, Dolphin,55 was still in its primordial stages, not yet capable of running a single commercial game, but Holtz was able to use it to analyze and poke at the data.

After a couple of months stepping through the code, taking notes and finding the multi-step functions the game used to mutate items and names into passwords, Holtz was finally able to present his achievement to the world: a program that would generate passwords for any item, for anyone. Once it was coded in a way that it could be embedded into a webpage, the password generator took off, making its way to every online Animal Crossing community and beyond. Lists of universal codes generated using Holtz’s program were used all over, eventually even growing to include unobtainable items like the Plum Kimono and Somber Robe that were only available during Japanese holidays removed from the US release.

Of course, even in a wondrous game community like Animal Crossing’s, there will be people who suck. People listed item codes on auction sites like eBay, hoping to snare unsuspecting Animal Crossing fans who wanted to purchase rare virtual items. Word spread quickly around the communities, through Animal Crossing fan sites and general gaming sites like IGN and GameFAQs to warn everyone: Don’t buy codes on eBay, you can generate codes for free now! And yes, those militant, justice-driven community members did get involved, naming and shaming the “horrible scammers” for their opportunism.

I may not always agree with it, but I enjoy revisiting the black-and-white morals of the early Animal Crossing community. A sizable portion of the online community were actual kids—kids like me—and we sometimes dominated the sites to the point where some, like AnimalCrossingCommunity.com, started a separate forum called “Grownup Gamers” to avoid us.

Kids can be naive. They have trouble with gray areas, and they have trouble minding their own business. They’ve seen a lot of cartoons and comic books and they know a thing or two about the pursuit of righteousness…and in their lives, perhaps the Animal Crossing community was the closest thing to moral conflict they had experienced. When kids learned that someone was selling these free, universal codes for profit, they leapt into action to report the sellers and warn any bidders.56 “Me and my friends were outraged when we found out someone was actually selling this,” posted one forum user under a thread titled The Ultimate Scammer, “I’d like to punch that guy…”

The early days of Project Hyrule were especially ripe with this sort of kid-justice. “Don’t Mess with the Community!” read the entrance to the community board on their website. “Anyone who would spend their time to cause trouble, I swear you will be banned and your IP with email will be made public.”

The kids had their hearts in the right place. It is bad to sell something that can be easily received for free—or to troll, spam, and cause trouble. It’s just a little strange that a game beloved for its relaxing and delightful gameplay was surrounded by a community so aggressively ethical.

●

Of course, that’s not the whole picture. Animal Crossing was a weird game carving out its own genre, and so there were a wide variety of people trying it out and getting involved. While some enterprising and tech-savvy fans were cracking item codes, others were expressing their creativity through fan art, fan fiction, photos of room layouts, or simply just participating in discussion questions on forum sites.

For most of the English-speaking world, there were two main hubs for Animal Crossing fans during the GameCube days: Animal Crossing Community (ACC), which still exists to this day, and Animal Crossing Ahead (AXA), which does not. There were others, of course—plenty of pockets of dedicated fans on general gaming sites and smaller sites like Project Hyrule and Crossing Central—but none as large and active as “ACC” and “AXA.”

Animal Crossing Community remains a cute, clunky website with a lot of useful features and intimate touches that made it a fantastic place for sharing and discussing. User profiles were set up to include a profile of your villager, and later to map your town’s layout so anyone in the forum could get a glimpse into one another’s worlds. My town’s wishing well was situated just an acre away from the beach so I had always associated the beach with community events, and I was genuinely surprised to see that most people’s towns had it somewhere in the middle. ACC’s most useful feature, though, was its pattern maker. Not only could you create patterns using the same tool as the one in the game, you could also browse an impressive list of community-contributed patterns. You’d have to carefully recreate them pixel by pixel in your own game if you wanted to use them, but it was an amazing source of talent and artistic inspiration.

Most of the people I spoke to about ACC recall it as a younger community than some of the other sites. “[ACC] had a good set of rules,” explained a mod by the name of SeaLion, who has been with the site since 2003. “I was in my teens then, and it looked like a pretty safe site to be a part of.” The atmosphere of the community was quite open and inviting, they noted. There were “dumb” questions because there were a lot of kids, but people were eager to reply and interact even when the subjects were silly.

Animal Crossing Ahead was a sort of rival to ACC. I spoke to Joe Walker, a former moderator, about what the AXA community was like and what kinds of discussions took place in the forums. “In the early days, there were a lot of discoveries,” he told me. “It was kinda the same vibe you’d get in elementary school at lunch time—everyone sharing information like that.” Each day people would post new discoveries about the game—some true, some false.

AXA was a warm community, and Walker credits that at least in part to the site’s semi-strict rule set. “It was a forum primarily for children, and so there were a lot of rules in place to keep things safe and appropriate for them,” he explained, adding that other sites didn’t seem to have those rules. (Leaders from every Animal Crossing site I spoke to seemed to remember the strict rules being unique to their respective sites.) While the moderators and at least a portion of the site’s users were adults, AXA seemed to attract a lot of kids and teens.

There were plenty of challenges that came with the territory of running a site for kids, but it was also a rewarding experience for Walker. “People definitely looked up to the staff. It was kind of a cool feeling when you’re eighteen and just out of high school and don’t know what you’re going to do with life,” he admitted. This active community was, for many kids, a welcoming and exciting space to interact with. It was a place to bring the communication and sense of community they’d been enjoying inside the game to the outside world.

“[Those experiences] feel real in a way that I think is important to young people who are trying to find their way in the world,” Walker said. “And I think it did a lot of good for a lot of people.”

It certainly did for me. I lurked around ACC and AXA while I played Animal Crossing on the GameCube. I responded to threads, posted some digital camera photos of my town, and tried to contribute to the discussions, but internet forums of the time were a tricky social landscape. Someone poses a subject, and lots of people respond to it. Readers skim your response among all the others, and no one remembers your username or avatar. Every thread was like one of those terrible icebreaker games where each person says something interesting about themselves—you’re so busy thinking about what you’re going to say that you don’t listen to anyone else.

I didn’t make a lot of friends then, but eventually I would.

It was January 2006, and I was about one month into Animal Crossing’s first official sequel, Animal Crossing: Wild World, on my new cobalt blue Nintendo DS when I discovered Nookbay.com. This new game had the absolutely mindblowing new feature of Wi-Fi multiplayer, opening the floodgates for a whole new dimension of communication. People could not only play with siblings and classmates, but could now play with friends and strangers around the world. I didn’t have to take and upload photos of my town anymore—I could invite people over to see it! Nookbay took these new features and found a wonderful market to corner: They would act as an online auction house for the virtual items and currency of Wild World.

The core concept of Nookbay needed one important and impossible thing to work: trusting strangers on the internet. Unlike eBay, the real virtual auction house for which it was named, the site couldn’t handle any of the game’s currency itself nor any other data. When you won an auction as the highest bidder, you would have to arrange a timed meetup with the stranger to exchange the agreed-upon bells for the agreed-upon item. It was all very handshake-y.

I rarely used Nookbay for its auctions, though. See, Nookbay had something I’d been yearning for all along without realizing…something magical that would let communication and friendship blossom like nothing ever before: an IRC.

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and if you were on the internet at all in the late 90s through mid-2000s, you’re likely well acquainted with them. You’re also probably aware that these virtual chat rooms often had the reputation of being distinctly not magical, but closer to a middle school boys’ locker room full of troublemaking and dick jokes. This was Animal Crossing, though, and the moderators kept a relatively tight ship. Every ship needs a captain, and our captain was Jess.

Jess was around twenty, which to my middle-school self, was about as old as any human who had ever lived. She was patient and kind with me as I embarrassed my way through being an unpopular tween on the internet, never even flinching in the face of being addressed as “JESSSSSHHH!!!!! :3” (She would later become a teacher—go figure.) After spending months active on the site, doing my best to be helpful, and some incessant begging and pleading likely punctuated by emoticon hearts and ^u^ faces, Jess let me become a moderator. I, the young wannabe punk in an anime t-shirt, who envied that her Animal Crossing avatar could actually wear all black. I, who went by the totally badass handle “Chaotic” but would burst into tears at the slightest criticism. I, who had almost no friends, who had no power over her peers, and wanted so desperately to be taken seriously—I had influence now.

Nookbay’s IRC became my full-time extracurricular. I’d be on it after school, on weekends, and anytime I was allowed in the computer lab during school, chatting about anything and everything under the sun, and inviting people to come visit my town and in-home coffee shop. I wasn’t in it for the power—the moderator badge was, at least theoretically, proof that people liked me. It was the concrete validation that middle school kids crave with every fiber of their being, especially if they were an outcast like me. I took my job seriously, answering questions and contributing to the community. Talking about Animal Crossing was my life, and I felt closer to my online friends than to my real life friends. Malik, Vicious, KNon, Doxxy, Roman, Sk8B0i, PiecesofWinter,—they were, if I recall my terminology correctly, uh, “teh r0ckz0rz.”

Cringe-inducing middle school memories aside, Nookbay was an important social playground for myself and others. The site started to die a while after the subsequent Animal Crossing game, Animal Crossing: City Folk came out, and was shuttered completely sometime thereafter. All the forum posts, all of our conversations, like with most defunct forum sites, have been erased from history. It was a relic of a different time, of a different internet.

My experience was similar to what Joe Walker had described in his time moderating AXA. In fact, AXA even got its own IRC shortly before the release of Wild World, which I somehow completely missed. “We saw a lot of younger kids kinda start their own online social groups,” he said. They’d naturally seek friendship with each other because they were eager to meet others who shared their interests, especially considering Animal Crossing hadn’t yet turned into a worldwide phenomenon.

Several of the people I spoke to still keep in touch with friends they made from Animal Crossing communities. Walker even met his wife there! Simply playing the game together—sharing and exploring each others’ worlds—is an incredible catalyst for friendship.

No matter which site you frequented to find these experiences, the community was enthusiastic to share information—helpful hints, opinions on characters, advice about room design, and gossip about the series’ future. They were also hubs of…well…misinformation.

A genuinely fun part of any community that sprung up before 2007 or so was the prevalence of wild rumors and urban legends. What began on playgrounds with innocuous lies like turning Link blue in The Legend of Zelda was amplified by the communities of the early internet. No matter which forum you belonged to, no matter the game, there were always people with creative urban legends or secret Easter eggs they claimed to be true. Tomb Raider had rumors of a code for naked Lara Croft, Pokémon had the Mew Under the Truck secret, and Animal Crossing had much more.

●

“0101010101110101!”
A purple bulldog with blood red eyes has moved into your town in the dead of night. If you talk to him, he only yells in binary code. If you try to enter his house, your game crashes. Or wait, maybe it’s if you speak to him? He’s chopped down all of the trees, and he could probably kidnap your favorite villager, too—maybe even delete your town data! His name is Brutus. Or Brutis. All of this totally happened to your internet friend, so it must be true.

Brutus was the perfect candidate for a rumor: He did horrible things to your game, so people tried to avoid him rather than find proof he existed. Even those who claimed to have seen him had the excuse that he makes your game crash, so of course they couldn’t get a photo! There were Brutus skeptics, but the rumor wasn’t put to rest until many years later when people were able to examine the game’s code and find no evidence of his existence.

Joe Walker remembers the big rumors on AXA were that you could obtain the NES game Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, and that the “pitfall” item, an item that you bury to set a harmless trap hole in the ground, could be used to play the actual Atari 2600 version of Pitfall.

As a kid, I typically latched on to rumors that made the game seem more sophisticated than it was. Some people claimed that if you went around being too much of a jerk, hitting your neighbors with nets or sending letters full of profanity, you would be arrested by Copper and Booker, the town police dogs. I was always a model citizen anyways, but I liked the idea that there could be consequences if you crossed the line from mischief to crime.

Of course, many rumors had some truth to them. There really is a rock you can hit with your shovel to enter Resetti’s “Reset Surveillance Center”—only in the Japanese release of Dōbutsu no Mori e+. There’s also a whale in the game, sort of, although it’s not catchable like that guy on the internet insisted it is. It’s just an enormous fish-shaped shadow that there’s a chance of encountering in the open waters while you’re ferried away to the island. (Nearly two decades later, in 2020, someone was finally able to force whale shadows to spawn in catchable areas, using cheating software. Fishing on this shadow results in catching an arapaima, as no actual whale data exists in the game.)

A lot has changed about the internet since those days. Rumors like these simply don’t carry weight like they used to, now that people have become adept at data-mining and reverse engineering games to find hidden secrets. “That was the prime era, I think, for video game rumors,” said Walker. “You know, kids love to make stuff up.” If someone were to create a hoax like Brutus today, it probably wouldn’t spread very far before the internet collectively proved it to be wrong. I certainly don’t mean to glorify false rumors, but looking back on it, it was…kinda fun! The prevalent ones became as much a part of the game’s lore as anything real—many even have their own entries in the various Animal Crossing wikis. Even today I still occasionally see forum posts pop up suggesting that adding a real Brutus—a purple dog with glowing red eyes—would be a celebrated addition to the game and a nice nod to the early community that created him.

The community has continued to see other significant changes from its early days. Forum posts sharing poor-quality digital camera photos of town and room design have advanced into sharp-looking screenshots, and patterns can now be shared via QR codes rather than relying on pixel-by-pixel recreation. It’s evolved into an artist community. There are less active forum sites for random discussion, and instead the focus has shifted to individually curated feeds that bring together aesthetically pleasing, creative designs for browsing. There are Tumblr pages that focus only on pattern designs and Instagram accounts that simply post pretty-looking town screenshots. It’s become a rich community for inspiration, but far more splintered in terms of discussion and friend-making. Dedicated sites aren’t as popular anymore, giving rise instead to smaller communities on Discord or Facebook, or sprouting up around Animal Crossing content creators.

Haken: An Animal Crossing Podcast began in 2017, during the lull between game releases, and grew a hungry community rather quickly. “Animal Crossing has a huge fanbase,” said Haken host Chuy, explaining his podcast’s origins. “I needed an outlet to talk about this game. I felt like I had been waiting for years at this point, there’s probably going to be a new Animal Crossing soon, and I wanna start talking about it and getting excited about it.” He said his community is cordial and well-mannered, always playing by the rules, echoing the memories of previous ACC and AXA leaders.

“I look at a lot of different [game] communities, and I think consistently you just don’t see any quite as nice as Animal Crossing,” he explained. The broader community is now more about overwhelming positivity and wholesomeness than ever before. It’s not that the earlier communities were negative or unwholesome, but they skewed less in that direction—a mix of all kinds of emotions and feedback both positive and negative. I once made the mistake of posting a joke about a character dying in a post-Animal Crossing: New Leaf community, and was met with a classic “I’m not mad, just disappointed” mom speech from several members. It’s all wholesomeness all the time—or please leave, thank you <3 <3 <3

Every community changes over time. The world was a different place in the early 2000s, and the idea of a game about an easy-going life was still novel. Even The Sims was only two years old then, paving the way for a new swath of gamers who now have hundreds of life-sim and casual games to choose from. But in the early 2000s, people stumbled their way into the Animal Crossing community because no one knew what Animal Crossing was. The kids had their militant rule-following, and the atmosphere was friendly, but it was all scattershot and ill-defined. It may feel different now that Animal Crossing is part of the mainstream, but the community has grown so ridiculously large that it’s impossible not to find like-minded pockets of fellow Animal Crossing fans.

52 This isn’t possible in the actual game but must have been during its development.

53 Takashi Tezuka would later remark to a journalist that they received lots of feedback from players who found this Kansai dialect scary.

54 Unless you shared your town with someone.

55 Dolphin was also the GameCube console’s internal codename at Nintendo before it was unveiled.

56 eBay used to publicly display the email addresses of sellers and buyers.

This Be a Wee Bit Technical, So Ye Better Mind Me Close!

Animal Crossing proved to be fertile ground for experimental ideas for the game’s developers. Whether you stick faithfully to Nintendo’s phrase of “communication game” or lump it into the more modern “simulation” or even “cozy” game genres, games of its ilk were still fairly rare in 2001, with plenty of unexplored territory. What could Nintendo add to make the game more interesting, especially as it got its second and third releases in Dōbutsu no Mori+ and Dōbutsu no Mori e+? Well, they certainly tried plenty of things!

If you’re of a certain age it may pain you to hear this, but for many kids like me, our first interaction with an NES was right here in the world of Animal Crossing. Digital furniture shaped to look like a real NES (or Famicom in Japan) could be placed in your house, but not just for showing off your retro gamer cred. Interacting with these items, each of which features a single game like Excitebike or Golf, brings you to a screen where you can actually play the entire NES game, just as if you were interacting with a real NES. These items are difficult to obtain in the game, with some being random lottery items, locked to Nintendo’s e-Reader cards57, or found only by connecting a Game Boy Advance console and visiting Animal Island, so having a couple of them in your in-game house is considered pretty impressive. Officially, a total of about twenty NES/Famicom games are available, although several of these are exclusive to a particular region or version.

The exception to this is that there’s one lonely NES item58—a model of just the console itself rather than the console and a boxed game—that appears to be for decoration only. “I want to play my NES, but I don’t have any software,” reads the dialogue bubble when interacting with this item. But what it’s hiding is a heck of a lot more interesting than that.

Engineer James Chambers, a hobbyist in the video game modding community, set out to reverse engineer Animal Crossing for the GameCube in the summer of 2017. He wanted to explore the possibility of creating mods for the game, one of his favorites growing up. Searching the game’s code for something that might trigger a debug or developer menu—a “back end” of the game that the consumer is not meant to see—Chambers found himself looking through the in-game NES emulator functions. There, Chambers saw data for NES games like the aforementioned Excitebike and Golf that already had their own furniture item, as well as what looked to be a function that would check the memory card for additional files.

With some technical probing, through trial and error, he was able to make nearly any NES ROM file work within the game through that game-less NES item.59 (On his website, he shows his process by loading up and playing Mega Man.) What did that function imply? Could it mean that Nintendo had plans to distribute other NES titles through the memory card? Perhaps, like with Pokémon, there might have been distribution events where people could add titles to their memory cards through a kiosk? Or maybe Chambers had simply stumbled upon a debugging tool, left in the game for reasons we can only speculate.

Chambers explained to me that while the feature was fully developed, it’s impossible to see without putting the right files on a memory card. There are tools within the game to support NES game save data, mark and save just the high score data, and even patch code into Animal Crossing itself. He also mentioned that some of the same code can be found in the Nintendo 64 version of Animal Crossing, but he hasn’t actually verified that it works the same way.

His discovery of the game-less NES item’s relationship with the GameCube memory card was not the first time different NES games had been “hacked” into the game. Developer and experimental designer Rachel Simone Weil figured out how to replace the games contained in NES items with her own NES games, in a hack she demonstrated on YouTube several years prior.

But even without knowing about the open NES emulator item, the fact that Animal Crossing used software emulation at all was revolutionary. There had already been “old” games inside newer games, like 1994’s Pitfall: The Mayan Adventures, which included a playable port of the Atari 2600 version of Pitfall!, but this was different. The games inside Animal Crossing aren’t ports—they’re straight-up, actual NES code. The emulation program is credited to Hideaki Shimizu and Tomohiro Kawase, who also worked together building the Game Boy emulator in Pokémon Stadium60. Prior to joining Nintendo, Kawase was a contributor to one of the earliest NES emulators, iNES. So although emulating NES games was not itself a new concept, this was the first time Nintendo actually used it in a commercial product, and they hired someone who had contributed to an “unofficial” emulator to make it happen. Given their modern attitude towards emulation, (Nintendo’s website had called emulators “the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers” from at least 2003 until recently) Kawase’s involvement is pretty interesting.

Classic NES games are a little unexpected to see in a game like Animal Crossing, so it probably doesn’t come as a shock to hear that the emulator wasn’t a planned component for most of the game’s development. NES emulation started as a separate Nintendo 64DD project, just as Animal Crossing had. Masanori Tanaka of Randnet (the 64DD’s internet service provider) told reporters that they were planning a downloadable NES game service and that the emulation work had been completed as of 2000. This Virtual Console61 predecessor never came to fruition, but the work was repurposed for Animal Crossing.

NES games haven’t made an appearance in the series since the first Animal Crossing. Perhaps, as Nintendo began to offer other ways to play NES games, it no longer made sense to include them “free” with Animal Crossing. The “NES Classic” Game Boy Advance series of games, which repackaged NES titles for the Game Boy Advance, were released shortly before the second Animal Crossing title, Wild World, hit the shelves. Katsuya Eguchi says the NES games “took players away from the adventure,” and wanted to “put more focus on living in the Animal Crossing world,” but I imagine those financial incentives played a role in the decision, too.

Emulation wouldn’t be the only technical gimmick up this game’s sleeve. Nintendo’s 2001 Space World featured the aforementioned Animal Island, with Shigeru Miyamoto demonstrating the new “link cable” product that would connect the Nintendo GameCube and Game Boy Advance. When using the link cable, a boat appears on the ocean docks to ferry players to the two-acre island inhabited by an exclusive villager and a small bungalow.

In this space, you can interact with your island’s sole villager, go fishing, catch insects, and gather coconuts, which can then be grown on the beach of your village. Miyamoto explained that using the cable, the island data could also be beamed straight to the Game Boy Advance for playing on the go—no cartridge needed. This data would be stored in the Game Boy Advance system memory, and could be beamed back into the GameCube later to save any progress.

Given the power differences between the GameCube and Game Boy Advance, the island-on-the-go is quite watered-down, with pleasant pixel art graphics and no visible player character. Instead, you control a cursor hand, interacting with the island villager by feeding them fruit, helping them catch fish, and a few other simple tasks. It’s almost nothing like the rest of Animal Crossing at all—more of a weird god-sim minigame to endure in order to score yourself some money, which the island villager randomly drops as you play.

The second function of the link cable is for designing clothing at the Able Sisters tailor shop, allowing you to take the pattern program with you. It functions just about the same as on the island—you can beam the information from the GameCube to the Game Boy Advance, take it with you, and then return it to the GameCube to transfer any data back into the game. Even though Animal Crossing had technically been announced for a Western release by 2001 and had only received a very small amount of coverage, the link cable demonstration was praised by most outlets.

With its enormous cast of villagers, the world of Animal Crossing was also a perfect candidate for the booming trading card industry, so like many Nintendo titles in the early 2000s, Dōbutsu no Mori+ and its subsequent releases tried their hand with the e-Reader.

The e-Reader was an odd accessory for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance: a bulky cartridge with an LED scanner to read data printed on cards. The data lives on the cards themselves rather than in the games, encoded in a series of tiny dots that the e-Reader interprets to unlock content. Nintendo produced over 1,000 e-Reader cards, mostly sold in several types of booster packs, and about a quarter of those were exclusive to Animal Crossing.

The game’s e-Reader functionality was ridiculously ambitious, equally convoluted, and incredibly expensive. Because it was a Game Boy Advance accessory rather than a GameCube accessory, you not only needed to purchase the $39.99 e-Reader, but you also had to own both a Game Boy Advance and a “Game Boy Advance to GameCube” link cable. Then you would purchase some booster packs of random cards and hope for something cool.

Not every card was useful—in fact, most of them could be used without an e-Reader entirely. Those that unlocked special clothing patterns or town tunes also included the blueprints to make them yourself, sans e-Reader, on the back of the card. Character cards featuring animal neighbors or special characters also included a password on the back that would function nearly the same as scanning the card. These passwords could simply be typed up in a letter and mailed to any villager, who would then reward you with a nice gift in return. (Scanning them would make a letter and gift arrive automatically, without having to mail anything first.) Nintendo even encouraged using the cards in this analog way—the paper manual included in e-Reader packs called it “Cable-free Connectivity,” but warned you to “keep passwords private.” “Do not send passwords to anyone who has not purchased Animal Crossing e-cards,” commands the manual. Wouldn’t want any excited twelve-year-olds to gain access to a printed code they didn’t spend their hard-earned $2.99 on, huh?

There were at least two cards every kid (and adult) wanted, though: the Classic Game Cards. In Animal Crossing, the NES games Ice Climber and Mario Bros. could only be obtained legitimately through e-Reader cards.

e-Reader cards functioned a little differently in Japan—hang on, because it’s about to get even more confusing. Japanese e-Reader cards were split into “e” cards and “e+” cards, following the releases of Dōbutsu no Mori + and Dōbutsu no Mori e+, respectively. In Japan, the original e-Reader accessory was released without a link cable port, meaning it could not function with the “Game Boy Advance to GameCube” link cable, so there was no way to scan the cards in-game. That’s right, the first four sets of Animal Crossing e-Reader cards in Japan didn’t work with Animal Crossing. Instead, the nearly 300 unique “e” cards could only be used with a Game Boy Advance and e-Reader. Character cards still gave out passwords to mail to a neighbor for a gift, but they’d have to be manually entered in Dōbutsu no Mori +. Game cards, featuring human avatars, offered a few other half-baked functions, like a relay race between character cards and fortune telling. The entire tedious ordeal involves slowly swiping cards and dealing with read errors, and for such minimal payoff. It takes four cards and five total card swipes just to unlock the relay race on the Game Boy Advance—and it’s not even fun.

In June of 2003, Nintendo released Dōbutsu no Mori e+ and that second type of Animal Crossing e-Reader cards called “e+” cards in Japan. The “e+” suffix denoted functionality with the upgraded e-Reader accessory, the e-Reader+. If you think reading this is confusing, just imagine how this went over in Japan. Thousands of Animal Crossing fans had already purchased an e-Reader, the one without a link cable port. Now if they wanted to use their previously purchased cards in the game itself, or buy a pack of the fancy new “e+” cards, they needed to buy another entire e-Reader accessory. Nintendo knew this was kind of a dick move, so they ran an e-Reader upgrade campaign through their website. Customers could send their old, link port-less e-Readers to Nintendo and get a reduced price on the e-Reader+—only 1,500 yen instead of the accessory’s MSRP of 4,800 yen. (Let’s also keep in mind that this was, for some Japanese Animal Crossing fans, their third time purchasing the exact same game in three years! While each iteration injected some additional features, it was all Dōbutsu no Mori.)

The “e+” series of cards, exclusive to Japan, debuted a new function. The first series contained 30 entirely new animal villagers, each of which could be commanded to move into your town with the swipe of a card. This feature wouldn’t return again until the amiibo card update in the 3DS title Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

The “e+” cards introduced many new animal neighbors, several of which have never appeared in an Animal Crossing title since and probably never will. The pixel-faced cat and dog duo, Meow and Bow, were styled after toy company Takara’s real-world “Bowlingual” and “Meowlingual” devices that promised to help you communicate with your pets. Kit, a smiley squirrel bearing more than a little resemblance to Rare’s Conker, shares his in-game birthday with the release of the first standalone title in the Conker series, Conker’s Pocket Tales for the Game Boy Color. Some cards could only be obtained through magazines, or the purchase of Animal Crossing merchandise.

As abstruse of an accessory the e-Reader was, the cards still make for some fun (and probably noncanonical) lore-reading. According to his card, the energetic police dog Copper is often out “busting illegal parkers.” The only vehicle in town is Gracie’s famous cherry-red convertible, and as far as I can tell, Copper turns a blind eye to her driving it through the grass and into our beloved, road-free little village. They say no one’s more crooked than a small-town cop.

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In yet another peripheral shove, Dōbutsu no Mori e+, that final Japanese version of the first Animal Crossing, was the first game compatible with an accessory you might not even know existed: a small gray rectangle just a little bigger than a standard GameCube memory card called the GameCube SD Card Adaptor.

Nintendo had planned to use the then-new technology of removable, rewritable data cartridges—SD cards—for expanded storage capabilities. Originally announced alongside the GameCube itself at Nintendo’s Space World 2000, the SD Card Adapter looked like the future of data storage—meant to function just like a memory card, but with more power and the ability to upgrade. At the Winter Consumer Electronics Show 2001, well before the GameCube’s release, the SD Pavilion displayed a prototype of the adapter and accompanying Nintendo GameCube. This accessory was given extensive coverage in several magazines and included in nearly all of the GameCube’s pre-launch coverage, but then Nintendo quietly stopped talking about it, launching the GameCube with standard memory cards only.

In July 2003, the SD Card Adapter limped back into the world through Nintendo of Japan’s online store, where it could be purchased there, and only there, for a modest 1500 yen (or 3000 yen with an accompanying 16MB SD card). Unlike as promised, it didn’t function like a standard memory card at all—in fact, the accessory was compatible with only two games: Dōbutsu no Mori e+ and Pokémon Channel.

Poor compatibility and purchasability aside, the SD Card Adapter had unique uses within Dōbutsu no Mori e+. It not only took in-game screenshots, but it could also save a copy of your town’s data, which could then be uploaded onto a computer and shared online or copied onto another SD card. No more handing your friend your precious GameCube memory card and hoping they wouldn’t wreak havoc on the town—you could simply email them a copy of your town’s data and they’d be able to download it to their own SD card and visit an exact replica. If you had a place to host it, you could even upload the town data online and let anyone with an SD Card Adapter peer into your world. Online multiplayer would come to the world of Animal Crossing just a few years later in the DS title Wild World, but the idea that someone could visit a time capsule version of your town—one where there wouldn’t be any consequences for pulling up the flowers or cutting down trees—wasn’t revisited again until 2012’s New Leaf.

As you can imagine, an accessory useful to only two games didn’t sell very well—in fact, the SD Card Adapter is among the rarest GameCube accessories manufactured. Its existence, however, remains a testament to the weird and experimental nature of Nintendo.

57 Nintendo-made paper cards with specially encoded data printed on them, used in several games—more on this soon!

58 Okay, and technically Super Tortimer, the joke furniture item from April Fool’s Day.

59 Some games do not function completely, or appear glitchy. The emulator is not able to accommodate every type of “mapper”—configurations designed to extend and bypass the normal capabilities of the NES.

60 While the Game Boy emulator was used first, it required players to link up their actual Pokémon Game Boy cartridge with Pokemon Stadium to function.

61 A line of downloadable video games first seen on the Nintendo Wii. Virtual Console titles are run in their original forms through software emulation.

Slow Down, Chill Out

Video games, at a real basic level, are about empowerment. That doesn’t necessarily mean “power” in the form of super strength, magic, or a giant sword—although those things might be attractive, too—but rather a feeling of control over a situation not often present in the real world. This isn’t meant to be a deep observation: the thing that separates video games from other forms of media is that you control it (usually with a controller).

Most games give you obstacles or puzzles, and the tools to overcome them. Your actions may not always directly control the game’s narrative, but they do influence the outcome. Sometimes games are a way to experience things you could never do in real life, and sometimes they’re nothing more than a vehicle for the simplistic satisfaction of clearing a row of blocks in Tetris.

Animal Crossing approaches control in a way that’s less explicit, that’s more about existing than controlling. There is virtually nothing in the game that punishes you, and nothing you can do to “win.” You don’t have to worry about regulating your time or resources, or remembering to eat. You can spend 400 hours doing nothing but fishing. You can ignore your debt, ignore your neighbors, and do absolutely nothing creative with the game if that is the peaceful life you choose. No pressure! People enjoy it in so many ways, and for so many reasons, because the game’s radical suggestion is that they’re allowed to.

When you compare that to a game like Harvest Moon, it becomes more clear. Other games “unlock” more mechanics, actions, and elements as you hit milestones. You must have enough grass before you can buy cows. You can’t have a kid until you get married, and you can’t get married until you’ve put all this effort into romancing one of the game’s bachelorettes. In Animal Crossing, your goals don’t further the game in any tangible way: Any objective you complete is merely personal. Any reward you reap, a piece of cool furniture or a shiny golden tool, is just a cosmetic badge of honor that communicates that you chose to pursue and complete a specific goal.

Animal Crossing is educational in a way that feels almost accidental. You don’t have to study the guidebook to get good at identifying insects in the game: If you play often enough, you’ll one day get excited because you saw a dynastid beetle in real life…and then you’ll remember that in the real world you can’t actually sell bugs to your local corner store.

Okay, maybe being able to pick out a barred knifejaw at the aquarium isn’t all that important of a skill. It has yet to earn me any more than some bemused head nods from people who probably assume I’m obsessed with fish. I still think it’s pretty cool that I’ve picked up the knowledge with exactly zero effort.

There’s a lot more to be accidentally learned from Animal Crossing. You’ll find a surprising amount of world culture tucked away in the game’s corners. The shady traveling salesman Redd peddles priceless works of art like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Degas’s The Star (Dancer on Stage), aptly given the in-game names of “Flowery Painting” and “Dainty Painting,” respectively. Gulliver, an adventuring seagull who occasionally washes ashore on the beach, gifts items from countries all over the world. There are Matryoshka dolls from Russia, wooden model Pagodas from Japan, and replicas of several famous monuments like France’s Arc de Triomphe and Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa. As a kid, I was only familiar with a few of these, like the Statue of Liberty and the Easter Island Moai heads, so Gulliver’s furniture set piqued my curiosity enough for me to look up these landmarks in the real world. …Although I still don’t entirely understand the choice to include, of all things, Brussel’s naked peeing child fountain Manekin Pis. Or as ten-year-old me called it, “Man, he can piss.” Oops, I was trying to demonstrate how cultured this game made me, wasn’t I?

You’ll also receive a less explicit education—soft skills, if you will—like the communication “practice” you get from making friends with your neighbors, or the rewarding feeling of setting personal goals. It may be a single-player game, but it wasn’t designed to be enjoyed alone, even if many of us did. The game encourages you to share your experiences—to communicate both inside and outside of the game. “It was our intention that Animal Crossing be a game the whole family can experience together,” explained producer Takashi Tezuka in an interview. Every commercial—heck, every piece of marketing—suggests this.

The game is designed to inspire conversations between players, whether positive or negative. Tezuka goes on to give examples: “You have situations where, unbeknownst to the parents, maybe their kid goes and visits a friend’s town, and new animals take up residence.” Each player’s contributions matter, and rely on some level of trust or cooperation. If you play the game with your family like Tezuka hoped you would, each decision you make forces you to think about the other people who live in your town. Will my sister be mad if I chop down these trees and plant flowers instead? What if I harvest all of the fruit and leave none for her? And while these lessons may be less explicit in a single-player Animal Crossing experience, your neighbors are built to be realistic enough that you’ll consider their feelings, too.

The game also gives you a healthy, constrained level of control over a virtual playground that teaches patience: You can nudge and nurture your Animal Crossing town towards a vision of paradise, but the trees still take time to grow, and the flowers only restock once per day. It’s not about city-planning or exacting perfection over every little patch of grass. When a new neighbor moves in, you can’t just dictate where you’d like them to live, and you can’t stop weeds from growing or the sky from raining. It’s the difference between the granular micromanagement of building a model train set versus attempting to control a living environment like a fish tank: You have choices, but you do not have absolute authority. The life lessons learned from unpredictability are far more valuable than being able to put your hands into every possible variable. Still, much like these two real world hobbies, there’s ample room to project creativity and order onto Animal Crossing.

I don’t think I fully recognized how masterfully Animal Crossing games manage player control until one of them got unfair—a feature of Animal Crossing: City Folk infamous to the community was that it was difficult to stop your grass from just…dying. Simply walking and running around town would deteriorate the grass, and there was no stopping it—regrowing took way more effort than it took to destroy it. Some people ended up with barren wasteland towns, which had the added effect of preventing several bug species from appearing. Existence was detrimental to your town. It was awful, and there was a community-wide effort to figure out optimal strategies for avoiding and repairing the damage. I realize it sounds dramatic now that I was anxious about virtual grass, but it was demoralizing to witness this spiral of destruction—and to suddenly lose control over something I’d never had to worry about. Animal Crossing is full of inconveniences I’d come to respect or even appreciate, but this was a straight-up penalty for playing the game at all.

Aside from this one little hiccup, though, the games have usefully managed player control because there are (fair) things outside your control. It takes real time and effort to curate a town perfectly to your liking as you chop down trees, arrange flowers, and plant fruit. There are no shortcuts. It’s a slow journey, and you can only improve it marginally each day, bit by bit. Many people, like myself, find this very relaxing. Therapeutic, even. It forces us to slow down. The game gives us some of the managerial control we want, but we can’t have it all at once…so we learn to chill out and accept our town for what it is.

That goes for the game’s approach to collecting, too. It takes a considerable level of dedication to complete the furniture catalog or fill the museum, so there is no way for casual completionists to 100% the game in a long weekend. You can’t race to the finish without cheating. Adding to and tracking the collection in small, incremental steps takes discipline, which makes it rewarding. Making items easier to collect would have weakened players’ feelings of accomplishment.

In fact, “slow down, chill out” might be one of the game’s most essential teachings. Everything in Animal Crossing encourages a slow and steady pace—nothing can be achieved all at once, and plenty of items take actual planning to acquire. Even the literal act of running in the game is one of the most punishing choices you can make, as it causes you to scare away fish and bugs and trample flowers—but you’re given ample freedom to do it anyways. Slowing down is your own choice, like any other.

What little lore and backstory exists in the world of Animal Crossing tends to focus on your character leaving a fast-paced life and settling into a quiet village. You begin the journey nearly penniless, alone on a train and with no new home or job secured. Though the game never explicitly says it, you’re escaping—and you’re left to either assign meaning to that or not. Later games build on this idea just a little bit, and only if you go looking for it. One of the game’s central characters, the local shop owner Tom Nook, apparently once fled his quiet country life for “the big city.” Starry-eyed and ambitious, he followed some dream left vague by the game’s dialogue—only to return several years later, chewed up and broken down by the difficulties of city life. Knowing co-director Katsuya Eguchi’s deep nostalgia for his own hometown, it makes me wonder if this tiny, hidden story is a reflection of his own feelings. Does he regret leaving for the city, too?

Of course, Animal Crossing is not the first game to explore this, nor is it the first game to draw on the idea that a simple, country life is more fulfilling than city life. Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada has recounted many times how he spent his childhood in the countryside dreaming of the city, only to find it lonely and unfulfilling when he finally got there. It inspired him to create a new kind of game that celebrated what made country life so special. It’s similar to the way Animal Crossing’s Eguchi has talked about his experience leaving Chiba.

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Animal Crossing offers many lessons. Self-expression. Communication and community. The rewards of patience, dedication, and hard work. You’re not the righteous hero of a fantasy world on the brink of destruction, there’s no grand injustices to overcome, and you’re not “the chosen one.” Instead, you’re quietly heroic in the way that a real world hero can be: by making your little corner of the world a better place. Plant trees. Be kind to your neighbors. Attend community events. That, to me, is a beautiful lesson.

Animal Crossing succeeds because it doesn’t add anything more than it needs to. Ironically, this is probably the biggest criticism players have with it. The train station that sits at the top of town almost mocks you. You came from somewhere outside of this village, but you’ll never see that somewhere—the only place you can go is other, near-identical towns with a different cast of animal neighbors. You’re trapped in your little town, left wondering what the rest of the Animal Crossing universe could be. Later entries to the series, working with fewer memory constraints, could have added more—but they didn’t. Even City Folk is a misnomer. The “city” is, like, five stores, and can be traversed from one side to the other in a few seconds.

Quite frankly, those who criticize the size of Animal Crossing games are missing the point. A giant world is difficult to make meaningful. Constraints force you to take the time to get to know your village and its inhabitants on an intimate level. It’s romantic and real—you share a space small enough that your life impacts your neighbors’ lives.

And it’s not just that Animal Crossing crafts a space not an inch too big. It doesn’t add any more things to do than necessary. There’s a whole arsenal of relaxing and satisfying game mechanics that might appear to be a natural fit at first blush—like resource gathering, cooking, or crafting—but none of those would have added anything meaningful to the game. They might even have distracted from the important things, like communicating and building relationships, and ultimately made the game feel less relaxing. If you have infinite tasks to do and infinite decisions to make, you’ll never need to put the controller down for the day. You’ll burn out faster and miss out on the Animal Crossing’s main virtue: the joy to be found in deep connections and personal accomplishments made slowly over time.

“The easiest thing in the world to do is more,” writes legendary game designer Sid Meier in his memoir. It’s easy to lose a really strong, effective concept when it’s crowded by others. In fact, that’s what caused the highly anticipated Maxis game SimsVille62 to be canceled: Mashing two incredible, fun games together made something neither incredible nor fun. There’s room in this world for wide open games with thousands of activities to explore, but I think they’d be less interesting than Animal Crossing. Running out of activities is part of the intended experience. Playing for only fifteen minutes per day is part of the intended experience. The game gives you just enough to do, just enough decisions to make, and just enough surprises to keep you coming back, without stressing you out that you haven’t made “enough” progress.

To me, Animal Crossing is interesting because it’s not like other simulation games. It’s a community to find purpose in. You’re in charge of your life, but you don’t have infinite decisions to make. You can be creative and imprint your identity onto the world, but it’s not an intricate dollhouse to pick and preen until yours is the only identity visible. Your village existed before you, and it will exist after you. It’s not an empty wasteland waiting for your masterful artistic direction to make it spring to life. Animal Crossing is not a blank canvas.

62 SimsVille was billed as a combination of SimCity and The Sims.

A Blank Canvas

In 2019, one year after meeting Hisashi Nogami, I entered the Nintendo booth at E3 yet again, this time to meet the current director of the Animal Crossing series, Aya Kyogoku. I was not feeling how I’d expected to feel.

The first gameplay footage of the newest game in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, had just been revealed the day before, and instead of the pants-on-head screaming in excitement I had planned for, I was bummed. The new game looked beautiful, but didn’t look like Animal Crossing to me. The showcase featured “grind-y” activities like crafting, and there was no preexisting village to move into: New Horizons would be about building your own island from scratch, with unprecedented customization options to shape it into whatever you wanted. “With a deserted island, players will be starting with a blank canvas,” Kyogoku explained in a Nintendo-published interview. All I could do was fire off a shaky social media post63 and figure out my feelings later—I had E3 to attend.

A friend of mine reached out that night with concern that I, the Big Animal Crossing Fan, with my several shelves full of Animal Crossing games, merch, and guidebooks, would be gutted by the trailer. The internet’s reaction to it was pretty good, if a little deflated by the news that the game would be delayed to 2020. I scrolled through my list of Animal Crossing content creators, mega-fans, and ambassadors and found only unbridled positivity. I was alone. “We have to get you in front of Aya [Kyogoku],” he said. I agreed.

Aya Kyogoku is my height—less than five feet tall. My height is a thing I’ve always been a little insecure about, so as I towered over her in the four-inch heels I wear to every industry event, I was suddenly struck by the feeling that I was that black coffee-drinking middle school kid again, trying to project some illusion of maturity. Kyogoku wore flats and a t-shirt and looked plenty confident and adult to me, and here I needed the crutch of heels and a brand new blazer.

Kyogoku has been called “the most powerful woman at Nintendo,” with credits for nearly a dozen games under her belt since joining the company in 2003. She worked on the Wii title Animal Crossing: City Folk, and served as the co-director for the best-selling and widely praised Animal Crossing: New Leaf for 3DS. There have been several Animal Crossing spin-off titles under her direction, and whether you love them or hate them, there’s no denying that her influence has pushed the series to reach a larger audience.

Kyogoku was incredibly nice to me. I don’t know if she was even briefed that I was there because I was unenthused about the newest entry in my favorite series, or just because I was writing a book, but she spoke in English for the small talk, and then my friend served as her translator as I tried to ask questions in the most polite way I could manage.

I didn’t get much out of it. She explained in polite and stock-PR fashion the game features I had already seen: that the deserted island concept was a way of differentiating this game from the others, and that building a community from scratch would be a fun and totally new experience for players. I left still feeling confused about how players could build anything communal at all if they were calling all the shots.

The first Animal Crossing title Kyogoku had a hand in, City Folk on the Wii, is generally considered the weakest of the series. The next installment, New Leaf for the 3DS, revitalized the fatigued franchise—outselling the Wii game by about 300%, and toppling the reigning champ Animal Crossing: Wild World. Kyogoku and her team accomplished this by challenging long-standing conventions of the series and making changes that went beyond just adding new features, characters, and items as they had with the last game.

When Kyogoku began work on City Folk, she felt she had a pretty good grasp on the franchise’s conventions, and continued to iterate on them. “We were aware that [Animal Crossing: Wild World] was a hit, and that, I think, also made us too afraid to consider changing the formula,” she said in her 2014 GDC talk. “As a result, we mistakenly stayed the course as we worked on the Wii version, even though this was the time we needed to consider making changes.”

Kyogoku learned her lesson. She would never again shy away from challenging series assumptions. With New Leaf, the major changes generally fell into two categories: increased player influence on the town itself (like making executive decisions on public works projects as town Mayor), and more opportunities to connect with other players (like uploading designs and screenshots directly to social media sites, or the online activity hub of Tortimer Island). Most of these changes were extremely well-received. Even the increase in control felt reasonable—sure, you could choose to build another bridge or add a nice flowery trellis, but many of these changes had to first be requested by one of the villagers. Your neighbors still had their own agency. You couldn’t force them to move64, rearrange their houses, or dress them up like your personal dolls.

It was a daring move to make so many changes, but it worked out. “We were aware that overhauling it completely meant risking making it something that was no longer part of the series,” she said in her GDC talk. It’s a difficult balance to strike, and she had to do it again with New Horizons.

Watching and rewatching the game’s trailer, I could not get the blank canvas metaphor out of my head. Completely apt in its name, New Horizons is uncharted territory for the series. The game begins with you moving to a deserted, weed-riddled island with nothing but a tent and some basics, and it’s up to you to build the entire community from scratch under the implicitly mandated direction of Tom Nook. Nook has evolved from small-town shopkeeper to tech overlord, monitoring your progress and giving you an infinite checklist of tiny “challenges” to complete via his own proprietary smartphone and reward system. In the game’s trailer I saw a laser-focus on player control, and nothing about community. Attention was on your ability to build a custom space from nothing and call all the shots, and it led me to worry that such a place would never really feel like “home.” This is the kind of overhaul risk Kyogoku spoke of: It’s not at all that these changes are bad, just that they represent a major change in what an Animal Crossing game is.

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Katsuya Eguchi once said that Animal Crossing is “like a strange parallel world of our own personal lives.” It seems parallel because it operates on many of the same limitations as the real world. The Animal Crossing series had never been about playing God. It’s playing within limits—learning through hard work and creative problem solving to nudge the world towards your vision, but accepting that not all can be changed. You’re carving out a space for yourself, rather than carving out the whole world for yourself. Even with civic authority as the town’s mayor in New Leaf, there were still many things that could not be changed and decisions that could only be made after they’d been suggested by one of your neighbors.

When New Horizons allows you to place an entire tree in your pocket and replant it wherever you see fit, it robs you of the feeling that the decision to plant a tree matters. When it has you choose whether a new neighbor is allowed to plop their house down in an inconvenient spot, it gives you jurisdiction that no single person in a community should have. The game communicates that your feelings and your desires are the most, or maybe the only important ones—and that makes the experience feel a whole heck of a lot lonelier. Your neighbors still talk a lot, but they no longer matter. They don’t get a say in their own community. They’re not even bold enough to be upset when you literally force them off the island because you found a pastel bear you like better. They’re just… props.

Look. There are probably millions of people out there who’d tell me I’m taking the game too seriously. In fact, New Horizons is exactly the kind of game they want. They don’t want constraints because constraints aren’t fun for them—control is! More control improves the game experience for them and allows them to have a more productive and relaxing time playing. They have a creative vision for shaping their world, and they want the ability to realize it in its entirety without compromise. That’s valid! Not only is it valid, but I am clearly in the minority here. New Horizons is one of the best-selling games of all time, and in Japan it’s literally outsold Super Mario Bros.

This was where my head was at the beginning of 2020, when the book you are reading was supposed to be done—and then suddenly it wasn’t. Somehow I found myself sitting down on the couch, wearing officially licensed New Horizons leggings, writing in one of two official New Horizons journals I got at Target, researching and compiling an ever-growing list of bootleg New Horizons merch on AliExpress. Something had happened here. Something…big. Not only had the Targets and GameStops and Forever 21s of the world picked up on the endless chasm of a need for Animal Crossing-flavored capitalism, but the need was so infinite that bootleg merchandising had picked up the slack.

I felt like I was starting over entirely.

2020 was a globally tumultuous year, to say the least. “Global pandemic” sounds like the plot of a video game, not a framework for our actual lives. But as the COVID-19 virus shuttered the whole world in the early spring and people began latching onto hackneyed phrases like “in these uncertain times” and photographing empty office buildings littered with enough environmental storytelling to make a movie director blush, a collective but unspoken wish grew: People wanted control over their lives again.

This is the world New Horizons was ultimately born into. It was in our hands on March 20, 2020, and three days later, my home city of Seattle was put on mandatory lockdown. Most of the rest of the world followed suit. If you weren’t an “essential worker,” you were home, wondering how the hell this happened in your lifetime and wishing you had more control over your life. It weirdly, and perhaps morbidly, ended up being the perfect time for a series overhaul.

New Horizons opened to rave reviews. Nintendo likely knew it would be a popular game, but I’m not so sure they were expecting world domination. Suddenly, everybody was playing Animal Crossing. Celebrities like Brie Larson, Chrissy Teigen, Elijah Wood, and even rapper T-Pain were talking about it. People who hadn’t played a console video game in years (or ever, in some cases!) were jumping on board, excited to have both a creative outlet and a way to connect with others during the COVID-19 lockdown. It was covered by the New York Times, Huffington Post, NBC, Time Magazine, and hundreds of other major outlets. And it sold over 22 million copies in less than half a year, eventually doubling the sales of the last game.

With so many people picking up the series for the first time, hardly anyone even noticed it was different than previous entries. The animals were friendly and said cute things. The game seemed gentle, relaxing, and moved at a satisfying pace. The real world sucked, and here was a place for planting flowers, watching tropical sunsets, and carving out paradise. No one thought anything of the fact that they could pull their neighbor out of his own birthday party to force him to move his house four inches to the left, or that there were suddenly infinite explicitly laid-out goals to check off of a list.

I snap a quick photo. It’s of the then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, hanging out with a neon blue, hoodie-wearing unicorn. I’m standing on the tropical island of “Biden HQ,” several months after New Horizons’s release, feeling a little incredulous. This is an Animal Crossing island run by the Joe Biden campaign, which means that part of their political strategy is spending hundreds of hours crafting a digital space specific to this one video game.

It’s also…impressively intricate. The details range from meaningful to twee—rainbow outdoor furniture to signal Biden’s pro-LGTBQ stance, a basement full of model trains to mirror his reverence for the railway system, and an ice cream truck parked outside to signal that, uh, he really likes ice cream. The island itself is a masterstroke of design, utilizing forced perspective and cleverly hidden doghouse and model vehicle items to look like the town stretches on for miles in the distance. Custom-patterned panels are expertly arranged around the white-bricked museum to make it look just like the White House. Sure, it’s kitsch, and yes, it’s definitely approaching “how do you do, fellow kids?” pandering, but man—that’s the future US president campaigning inside a video game. Historic waters for the medium of video games, even if you think the waters are lame.

And Joe Biden’s campaign team was far from the only marketing department to get the message. Fashion brand Marc Jacobs showed off their latest designs by making replicas you could wear in the game. The Detroit Lions NFL team revealed their season schedule through a series of short Animal Crossing skits, like burying a teddy bear in the dirt to allude to the Chicago Bears, and slightly less cleverly, whacking a guy in a Green Bay Packers jersey over the head with a bug net. New York City’s famous Metropolitan Museum of Art shared their collection of paintings through an application on their website, allowing users to turn any work of art into an in-game pattern to hang on their wall. Animal Crossing had graduated from game to corporate marketing vehicle, and I was frankly too impressed to be upset.

New Horizons may be a game where a tech CEO monitors your every move via smartphone and pays you in his own proprietary currency, but evidently some of the real-world marketing proved a little too dystopic for Nintendo. A November 2020 “Usage Guidelines” update asked that businesses and organizations not use the game as a marketing platform that directs people to campaigns or webpages outside of the game, and vaguely prohibited “bringing politics into the game.”

With celebrity endorsements, Kentucky Fried Chicken islands, entire sections of Animal Crossing merchandise at Target, it was clear that New Horizons was rocketing past “astounding success” and arriving at “cultural phenomenon.” I have my criticisms of the game design, but I can’t argue with the market—it’s still an incredible game. It’s just a different game. It’s a fundamental departure from some of the crucial tenets of the original game—the ones that I think made it particularly unique. The idea that you, as the player, are not in control, is not a concept many games explore, and one that makes it so meaningful. The original Animal Crossing is full of tiny inconveniences that force you to pause and consider your decisions and experience the full spectrum of community life. Character designer Noriko Ikegawa put it aptly: “We wanted to make some things that felt like obstacles. Like it would be good to include some things that you didn’t necessarily want to happen.”

In New Horizons, there’s little concept of inconveniences beyond the time it takes to gather crafting material. Patience still plays its role, as the game still operates in real time, but almost no activity is off-limits. There’s no learning to reconcile or make friends with a villager you don’t like (you can pretty easily force them to move), and there’s no having to go the long way around the river because there’s not a convenient bridge nearby (you’ve got a pole vaulting tool for crossing the river anywhere). Later on in the game, you can even terraform the whole island to your will—widen the river, remove a cliff, or make a cute heart-shaped pond. All of these customization tools make people feel very satisfied, but it comes at the cost of community: It’s the canvas you painted all by yourself.

In the end, the overhaul worked out marvelously for Nintendo. It might have even been necessary. In the midst of a global pandemic, with people feeling such a terrible loss of control over their own lives, unable to celebrate friends’ birthdays or even just share drinks with a coworker, could a game that didn’t give you so much control have been nearly as popular? Would a game with anthropomorphic animals who were flawed and sometimes cantankerous have even been palatable?

Life in 2020 sucked. Like, “nearly half of the US is now struggling with mental health and substance abuse issues” sucked. And it turns out, the collective world’s psyche was so deeply shaken by this suck that we were in the prime position to receive an endless stream of sunshine and rainbows, entirely unironically. The more articles and blog posts I read about the warm, inviting embrace of island life, the more I started to understand. Life was suddenly scary and uncertain. The world was coping by crying into an entire pint of the triple chocolate ice cream sweetness that was New Horizons. They didn’t need or want that ice cream to have too much complexity or nuance. It didn’t need to teach them about how rewarding it is to eat ice cream slowly and patiently, or make them earn the ice cream by saying nice things to it every day. People were hurting, and this game brought them comfort.

And to be fair, even I had my moments. The retail stores I co-own, Pink Gorilla Games, had to be closed from late March until June 2020, so to keep everyone employed, we had them work the empty stores cleaning, testing, and selling games online. I took the undesirable midnight-to-9 a.m. shift, so I spent a lot of time on my island in the hours that few others see.

I went days at a time without really having people to speak to besides my animal neighbors, but I found comfort in the details. The way the sky looks just before dawn—seafoam green, lit by a halo of yellow. The sound of footsteps in the sand, and the gentle waves rolling onto shore. Watering my flowers and watching them sparkle in the morning sun. Those things brought me the peace I needed, just as the quiet moments of countless other Animal Crossing titles had.

So while I putzed around in frustration that my animal neighbors acted like opinionless yes-men (yes-animals?) that clapped and cheered with an uncomfortable amount of adoration for someone they’ve only known for a few days, I realized that others might really need to hear some encouraging words from a cute penguin right now. For millions of people, New Horizons was their first Animal Crossing game, and it came at a time where they felt plenty challenged by their real lives. They didn’t need a “strange, parallel world”—they needed a peaceful island escape.

Animal Crossing may have lost touch with its roots, but it took hold in the lives of millions of people, bringing them comfort and joy in a desolate time. It helped people connect with their friends, “hanging out” in a virtual space when a physical one was impossible. It brought them a sense of weird normalcy as they replaced their real world rituals with Animal Crossing equivalents—holding graduation ceremonies, birthday parties, and even first dates on the backdrop of their very own islands.

I know Animal Crossing won’t ever be the way it was again. It’s too successful to not continue through its next logical steps—farming. Cooking. More hyper-aesthetic pastel furniture. Town expansions. Even more pastel furniture.

The future of the franchise is a simulation game. Nintendo’s website in the US even calls Animal Crossing: New Horizons that, having dropped the “communication” label for a more established and familiar genre years ago. It’s more peaceful, it’s more malleable, and it’s more orderly. It’s easier to explain. It’s easier to exist within. It’s a place to retreat into that’s free of the stresses and the trials of the real world, rather than a manageable and subdued mirror of them. It’s become a less inconvenient world, but perhaps a more necessary one.

63 My exact tweet was “What we just saw was not Animal Crossing and I am concerned.”

64 Until the game’s Welcome Amiibo update, wherein you could buy and scan real life cards to summon villagers to your town.

NOTES

This book is based in part on original interviews with James Chambers, Leslie Swan, Chuy, Ryan Holtz, Joe Walker, Jeff “JVS,” Joshua Sloane, Jamal Qutub, and Jim Wornell, as well as pseudo-anonymous interviews with “SeaLion,” “Emilee with two E’s,” and “Quantrell/Qtoval.”

The book makes frequent use of the long-running Japanese video game magazine Famitsu. Articles about Animal Crossing attributed only to “Famitsu Staff” appear in the following issues: September 1, 2000, September 15, 2000, April 27, 2001, May 4, 2001, and June 22, 2001, as well as the article “Software Impression: Dōbutsu no Mori,” which appeared in the July 6, 2001 issue. Famitsu articles about Animal Crossing attributed to Kisko Okumura appear in the following issues: May 25, 2001, June 1, 2001, June 8, 2001, June 15, 2001. The September 21, 2001 Famitsu article “Haniwa Club goes to Nintendo Space World 2001!!” is attributed to Kisko Okumura, Ayumu Sugaya, and Fujinotchi. In the fall 2001, Famitsu also published an ongoing Animal Crossing column called the “KK Bulletin,” alternately attributed to different writers including Kisko Okumura, Ayumu Sugaya, Fujinotchi, Mariko, and Yoshida Ranbu. The “Bulletin” issues referenced in this book were September 14, 2001, September 23, 2001, October 5, 2001, October 5, 2001, November 11, 2001, November 30, 2001, and December 12, 2001.

The book often quotes from “Dōbutsu no Mori Developer Interview” was conducted by Nintendo Dream Staff and published in Nintendo Dream in 2001 in issues #6 and #7. The staff’s responses were translated into English for this book by Alex Highlander.

Introduction

The audio of Katsuya Eguchi’s March 23, 2006 GDC talk, “Is that a Franchise in Your Pocket?” is available at Internet Archive.

History’s Important, You Know!

Information on the Nintendo Dentsu Game Seminar comes from .

“[Nintendo Archives] Looking Back at the 7th Nintendo Game Seminar” was published by Inside Games on March 16, 2005.

The Iwata Asks interview “Nintendo Game Seminar 2008 - The Road to Completing Animal Crossing Part 1” was translated to English by Nintendo World Report and published by Matt Walker on July 11, 2016.

Akinori Sao’s interview with Takashi Tezuka, Shigefumi Hino, and Hisashi Nogami on October 11, 2017, can be found on Nintendo.com as part of their “Nintendo Classic Mini” series. The interview is titled “SNES developer interview – Volume 5: Super Mario World and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island” and is accessible at .

The 2008 article “Eguchi Crossing” is featured in Edge Spain #31 in Spanish: Edge Spain #31.

The Edge Staff’s August 29, 2008, article and Eguchi interview, “The Inside Story of Animal Crossing,” can be accessed via Internet Archive.

A 2003 interview with Katsuya Eguchi and Hisashi Nogami, originally published by Nintendo Online Monthly, has been translated into English by Alex Highlander on his site Shmuplations. It’s also quoted in the chapters “You’re New in Town, Aren’t You?” and “Genre: Communication.”

Patrick Klepek’s April 22, 2014 article “As Nintendo Evolved, So Did Animal Crossing” is featured on Giant Bomb.

Peer Schneider’s article “Mario Artist: Talent Studio (Import)” was published on IGN on August 27, 1999.

Peer Schneider also authored “Everything About The 64DD,” an article published on IGN on February 9, 2001.

Animal Crossing Design Team Interview was published by Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun (Hobonichi) on April 11, 2001.

Kevin Gifford’s article “More Trivia Than You Ever Dared To Know About The 3DS Animal Crossing” was published on Polygon on November 7, 2012.

The Wired Staff conducted an interview with Katsuya Eguchi, “Interview: The Wild World of Katsuya Eguchi,” published on Wired on April 7, 2006.

Information on game sales can be found at .

Brian Ashcraft’s article “Why Are Consoles Banned in China?” was published on Kotaku on July 15, 2010.

Genre: Communication

Greg Sewart’s piece, “Editor’s Choice Award: Animal Crossing” was featured in the October 2002 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly.

The Nintendo Official Magazine UK’s November 2000 issue #98 included coverage of the forthcoming “Animal Forest” by the NOM Staff.

The Bell Tree forums are at belltreeforums.com. The book quotes from the thread “Writing letters to villagers.”

James Chambers published “Reversing the Animal Crossing letter system” to his blog, Jamchamb’s Blog, on August 5, 2018.

Cute and Poisonous

Raymond Padilla’s Animal Crossing review was published on GameSpy on July 17, 2002.

Peer Schneider’s Animal Crossing review was featured on IGN on September 5, 2002.

Christian Nutt’s article “An Inviting Mini-World: How Nintendo Made Animal Crossing,” based on an interview with Katsuya Eguchi, was published on Game Developer on June 19, 2013.

Where YOU Are the Famous Fashion Designer!

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer Complete Guide was published in Japanese on September 10, 2015, by Kadokawa/ASCII Media Works.

The View From the Treehouse

For this chapter and “Snow Prints and Sunburns,” I received consultation from Tom James, a professional localizer, who was a great resource on topics like Japanese humor and lifestyle.

Jason Schreier’s article “Nintendo’s Secret Weapon” was published on Kotaku on April 22, 2014.

Brian Altano and Jose Otero had Bill Trinen and Ann Lin on their IGN podcast Nintendo Voice Chat on September 25, 2015 for the episode “The Charming People Behind Animal Crossing.” on the Nintendo Voice Chat podcast by IGN.

“Interview: Bill Trinen Of Nintendo” was published on Game Informer on October 10, 2003.

This book and especially this chapter used some Japanese Animal Crossing guidebooks for reference: Dōbutsu No Mori e+ by Okitsu Matsu, Takeshi Sasada, Hiroyuki Terasaki, and Megumi Toyoda, and published by Nintendo Dream in 2003; Dōbutsu No Mori. by Aoi Kobayashi et al. and published by Enterbrain in 2001; Dōbutsu No Mori+ by Aoi Kobayashi and Mahiro Hoi and published by Enterbrain in 2002; and Dōbutsu No Mori by Takashi Watanabe, Noriko Oketani, Satoshi Kajiwara, Tatsuhiko Mizutani, and Yasushi Nakahara, and published by Shogakukan in 2001. I also consulted the English-language book, Animal Crossing: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by David S.J. Hodgson, which was released by Prima in 2001.

Juran Aoyama and Hiroyuki Sakamoto authored the Dōbutsu No Mori+ Leisurely Life Book in 2002. The book was published in Tokyo by Futabasha, Co, ltd.

Clyde Mandelin’s article “2 Characters in Animal Crossing Who Changed Gender in Localization” was published on Legends of Localization on June 22, 2013.

Alan Averill, Jessica Folsom, and Steven Grimm authored the Animal Crossing: Nintendo Official Player’s Guide, published in 2002 by Nintendo of America.

Na Me Moh, Me Mow

The patent for Animalese (described as “Output unit for synthesized voice, its method and recording medium”) can be found on Google Patents. It was filed by Taro Bando and others.

Jenna Stoeber’s video “Animal Crossing’s Fake Language Sounds Different in Japanese” was published on Polygon on March 22, 2020.

Koji Kondo, Taro Bando, and Yoji Inagaki discussed sound in “All About Sound” in Japanese, published on January 6, 2003 on Nintendo’s website and archived by Internet Archive.

Karl Brueggemann and Will Brueggemann discussed Animal Crossing in Episode 345 of the Super Marcato Bros. podcast, published on November 18, 2018.

The Toru Minegishi interview “Inside Zelda #13: The Sounds of Twilight” was published in Nintendo Power on June 1, 2006, and is archived at Zelda Dungeon.

It’s A Lot Of Fun, I Swear

The E3 2001 presentation and trailer is available in the video “Animal Crossing (GameCube) E3 2002 Reveal” hosted by Animal Crossing Archive on YouTube.

Nintendo of Europe published an interview with Hisashi Nogami and Katsuya Eguchi “Learn More about the Development of the Animal Crossing Series in Our Interview!” on November 25, 2016.

John Ricciardi shared a photo of the Animal Crossing English-language PR materials from Spaceworld 2000 on Twitter: “Featuring all your favorite characters, including Dog Policeman, Pelican Postman, and Raccoon.”

The Japanese Animal Crossing commercial in which a girl wants a room of her own is uploaded by the YouTube channel 83Chrisaaron with the title “Animal Crossing / Animal Forest (Long) Japanese Commercial.”

“Animal Forest” was featured in the August 2001 issue of Nintendo Official Magazine.

Lisa Mason and Matt Helgeson reviewed Animal Crossing in the October 2002 issue of Game Informer.

Chris Kohler provided photos of Animal Crossing’s press release materials, which he received as a journalist.

Brett Elston’s review of Animal Crossing was published on GamesRadar on March 17, 2006.

The Animal Crossing that spoof The Real World can be viewed on YouTube.

Katherine Monk included Animal Crossing in the Gift Guide for Video Games in The Vancouver Sun on November 30, 2002. Don Oldenburg featured Animal Crossing in the article “Play Time” in the Quad-City Times on December 13, 2002. Mitch Schafer wrote the review “Video Games: Animal Crossing” in the Tampa Tribune on September 27, 2002. Cindi Lash wrote the review “Talk to the Animals” in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on September 27, 2002. All four are examples of newspapers lightly or heavily misrepresenting the game’s mechanics.

Rules are Rules, OK?

This chapter references old message board posts from the Animal Crossing Community (ACC), which is going strong on animalcrossingcommunity.com and on Twitter @accommunity. Many old posts are archived here.

The chapter also references Animal Crossing Ahead (AXA). While AXA no longer exists, its old forums are available via Internet Archive.

This Be a Wee Bit Technical, So Ye Better Mind Me Close!

James Chambers published “Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing’s NES emulator” to his blog, Jamchamb’s Blog, on July 11, 2018.

Rachel Weil shared the video “[GCN] Animal Crossing hack that replaces NES game” on her YouTube channel, Femicom Museum on February 9, 2015.

Information about Dōbutsu no Mori e+ can be found on the .

Yukiyoshi I. Sato published the article “Downloadable NES Games on 64DD” on GameSpot on February 17, 2000.

The Gamers’ Republic Staff discussed the SD card adapter for the GameCube in an article titled “You Can’t Afford It, Don’t Need It, But Have To…” in Gamers’ Republic in March 2001.

Slow Down, Chill Out

Sid Meier’s autobiography Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games was published September 8, 2020.

A Blank Canvas

Aya Kyogoku and Katsuya Eguchi delivered a GDC presentation titled “How to Turn a New Leaf at the Animal Crossing” on March 9, 2014.

The mention that nearly half of the US struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues during covid comes from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for the week of June 24–30, 2020.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a Metacritic “metascore” of 90 (“Universal Acclaim”) based on 122 reviews as of this writing.

Examples of brands, campaigns, teams, and museums using New Horizons: CNET published “Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a KFC fast food island” by Bonnie Burton on June 17, 2020. The Verge published “Detroit Lions reveal schedule through Animal Crossing: New Horizons” by Taylor Lyles on May 8, 2020. CNN published “ Joe Biden has his own island on ‘Animal Crossing’ where you can learn about his campaign” by Alaa Elassar on October 18, 2020. Siliconera published “Marc Jacobs and Valentino Release Animal Crossing: New Horizons Outfits” by Kazuma Hashimoto on May 4, 2020. Polygon published “The Met opens its art collection to Animal Crossing, too” by Nicole Carpenter on April 28, 2020.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It took the support of a small army to make this book happen.

I’d like to thank the Pink Gorilla team for holding down the fort and giving me the opportunity to pursue writing this. To my family and to my partner Johnny, your encouragement throughout the process meant everything to me.

I’m grateful to Jonathan Yeckley and Dylan Rhoads for advocating on my behalf to Nintendo. To the Boss Fight Books editors Gabe Durham, Michael Williams, and Alyse Knorr: thank you for your guidance, expertise, and patience—and for laughing at my jokes. Special thanks to Alex Highsmith for the exceptional translation work provided throughout this project, and to Tom James for helping me better understand and articulate much of the Japanese culture referenced throughout this book.

I am also so thankful to everyone I interviewed, including Leslie Swan, Joshua Sloane, Joe Walker, and so many others, for their insights and contributions.

Cuyler’s outstanding decompiling work on Animal Crossing was invaluable to my research.

Ryan Holtz and James Chambers not only contributed to Animal Crossing history, but patiently broke down their technical achievements so that I could share them with the wider world.

The Video Game History Foundation was instrumental in putting this together: special thanks to Rich Whitehouse and Phil Salvador for their help, and to Frank Cifaldi for tirelessly reading and re-reading my drafts, providing critical feedback.

Finally, I would like to thank Joshua Davis, Aimee Hart, Stefanie Kischak, and Joe M. Owens for their meticulous copyediting work.

Every one of these folks, and so many others who encouraged me along the way, were crucial in making this happen.

Special Thanks

For making our sixth season of books possible, Boss Fight Books would like to thank A Reynolds, Aaron Murray, Alex Baughn, Alex Cox, Alex Wreschnig, Andreia “shana” Gaita, Andrew Evans, Andrew L, Andrew Mildahl, bluebomber1313@gmail.com, Brent M. Diskin, Brian Fishman, Brice Gilbert, Casey Lawler, Cathy Durham, cecilnick, César Augusto Rivera P., Chris Ayers, Chris Hertling, Christian Rohde, Colbin Erdahl, Collin Banko, Conor Lastowka, Corey Losey, Craig Snyder, Dave T, David Louis, Donald Hopkins, Dr Derek Bulner, Drew Petersen, Dylan Joseph Lee Catania, Elliesberlinkey, Erik Malinowski, Felicity Chevalier, Forrest Greenwood, Graham Faught, Graham Guletz, Greg Cobb, Greg Mattson, In memory of Nicole, J. Kyle Pittman, Jake W Landis, jamiza, Jared Cherup, Jason Boyer, Jay and Problems, JediGameFreak, Jeff Methot, Jeff Peterson, Joe Alonzo - RadJunk, Joel W, Jonathan Blue, Jose Olivenca, Joseph ‘UnparalleledDev’ Silberstein, Juan Morales-Rocha, Justin K Cole, Justin Tsang, Kelly Brown, Lasse Bruun Hansen, Leigh Chang, Liz Walsh, Lost In Cult, Lou Sementa, Lucy Lin, Mario Diaz de la Rosa, Mark Kuchler, Mark Sztainbok, Matt Leung, Matthew Ratzloff, Max Weltz, Michael B Jones, Michael Strickland, Michael Tashbook, Mike Janes, Mitchel Labonté, Nathan Asper, Nevan Hartle, Nicholas Payne, Nick Chester, Nick Eliopulos, Nick Folkman, Nicole Amato, Patrick Trevathan, Paul DerHagopian, Quest4Best Wayne III, realslimjd, Random Encounters, RegularDude, Rocco Buffalino, Ross Stinemetz, Russell Wiley, Ryan Adams, Ryan Shelby, S. O’Rourke, Scott Mendenko, Sean Flannigan, Sean M. Morrow, Stephen Trinh, Topher Davis, and Wes Young.

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3. ZZT by Anna Anthropy

4. Galaga by Michael Kimball

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33. Animal Crossing by Kelsey Lewin

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