Animal Crossing (2001) - A game about living

Casual gaming can be a wonderful thing. While competitive and hard-core gaming genres, e.g. fighting, racing, first person shooters etc, have their core audiences, some gamers play just to have a fun time at their own pace. Personally I don't think there's been a game that does this quite like Animal Crossing, and since we're now upto the fifth major title for the series, I thought I'd take a look back at it's roots, Animal Crossing for the Nintendo Gamecube.

The PAL region box art

Animal Crossing is a game about friendship, family, and community and is based around you, the player, arriving in a new town and starting an independent life. In the town are a random assortment of neighbouring animals, as well as permanent characters who are responsible for shops, town services and other purposes. While most games are clear in their objectives to the player, Animal Crossing allows you to make your own objectives, or to have none at all. Developing friendships with villagers, paying off the loan on your home which can lead to an upgraded interior, filling a vacant museum with displays, are all options to be explored as ones own pace.

The player stood outside their house

What makes Animal Crossing truly special is how it simulates a town that's lived in and how it changes with time. Villagers are who you interact with, do favours for, receive gifts from and so on, but they aren't there forever. Like in real life, sometimes they decide that they want to start fresh somewhere else, and will spontaneously announce they're moving out. You then welcome new villagers, and the cycle continues. Making things sweeter is each villager has their own personality, likes, dislikes, styles etc, so they'll be some you love, some you hate or some you just don't want to bother with, kind of like real life? This adds to that theme of community and is one of the reasons the game feels alive.

Another reason the game feels alive is because it basically is. The game itself is synced with the Gamecube's internal clock, meaning whatever time it is on the outside of the game, is what time it'll be in game. Therefore, playing during the morning, afternoon or evening, is reflected when playing is a key part of the gameplay loop. For example, the shops have opening and closing times, the villagers will comment on how late in the day you start playing (or how often you play in the first place) and inhabitants of the town will go to sleep. The same can be said for the four seasons of the year, with each season bringing it's own unique changes to the environment, flora and fauna. Holidays are also taken into account, so when a national holiday is taking place, an event or activity will be available to mark the occasion. This, at its core, is what makes Animal Crossing special, and the reason it received critical acclaim, becoming one of Nintendo's most famous franchises.

Night time and Winter season in Animal Crossing

But how did it come to be? Well the development gets pretty convoluted. The initial idea for Animal Crossing came from Katsuya Eguchi, who came up with the game reflecting on his own experience as a game designer. Eguchi was just 21 when it began work as a designer at Nintendo in 1986 and had to move away from his home and family to work at Nintendo's headquarters. This feeling of being in a new place, away from familiar faces and loved ones, and having to adapt to a different environment is what inspired the gameplay of Animal Crossing. It's also stated that Eguchi wanted to make a game more family-orientated, saying:

"This was something that the kids could play after school, and I could play when I got home at night, and I could kind of be part of what they were doing while I wasn't around."

Animal Crossing was originally a Japanese exclusive experience, as it was first created in 2001 for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (64DD) add-on peripheral. Due to the 64DD failing commercially, a version was released for the standard Nintendo 64, followed by an updated version for the Gamecube, which is the version that was released internationally as Animal Crossing.

The 64DD add-on

As previously mentioned the game was a massive success, and rightly so. There's something appealing about a game that just lets you exist in its world. While there isn't as much to do as in newer releases, most notably Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the Nintendo 3DS, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch, there's enough to keep you playing for a long time, and while it encourages you to jump on once a day, there's no time limit, nothing that requires your devoted concentration to, no conflicts to resolve (aside from villagers occasionally falling out with each other) and no pressure to succeed. It's simply a social simulator and a wonderful way to relax and let off a bit of steam.

Fishing in the game

I'd like to close this off with a few things I've discovered myself from my time playing the game. Just some things I think are neat and have enjoyed the most.

The museum is what I always strive to complete when I can. Fish, insects and fossils can all fill up the display cabinets, and maintained under the watchful eye of Blathers the Owl.

I've already touched on villagers having personality, but something I love is that some of them are just straight up rude to you. One of my villagers is a bear called Vladimir, who basically never really wants to speak to me, or anyone else. On the occasions when I do help him out with something, I'm usually met with a disappointed "nyet..." I love this and wish it was a continued feature, as New Horizons on Nintendo Switch doesn't have any rude or annoying villagers.

I absolutely adore the NES consoles you can find in the game. These are items you can place inside your home, with each item having its own NES game available to play. These are full games too, not demos, which means a collection of them gives you access to the official Nintendo games, within a Nintendo game. As someone who loves old games, this is an absolute win for me and makes me want to find them all.

Overall I love Animal Crossing, my only gripe is that it's got a bit of a slow start which might put some people off, but if you can persevere like I did you'll find a wonderfully pleasant experience to have and revisit. Keep in mind that you'll probably need a memory card specifically for the game as it requires a lot of memory storage. Ultimately it's a charming classic, one of the best games on the Gamecube, and the humble beginning to a much loved Nintendo series that will hopefully last for a long time.