Despite the convoluted journey between concept and finished product, despite all the many things that change between initial prototype and whatever ends up in players’ hands, something always remains of the initial feeling that inspired a video game. If you know what to listen for, it’s easy to hear the echo of that original idea. Pokémon was born from a fascination with creatures, Zelda from nostalgia for the freedoms of childhood. Animal Crossing, meanwhile, was born from loneliness.
Katsuya Eguchi left his home prefecture of Chiba, east of Tokyo, to join Nintendo in 1986. He found it hard to adjust to living in Kyoto. “When I moved . . . I left my family and friends behind,” he told Edge magazine in 2008. “In doing so, I realized that being close to them—being able to spend time with them, talk to them, play with them—was such a great, important thing. I wondered for a long time if there would be a way to re-create that feeling, and that was the impetus behind the original Animal Crossing.”
Eguchi had a long career at Nintendo—he was a level designer on Super Mario Bros. 3 and Yoshi’s Story, and director on Star Fox and Wave Race 64—before the opportunity to explore his idea of a “communication game” arrived in the late 1990s. Nintendo was working on a floppy disk drive add-on for the N64, called the 64DD. Its disks had a then-ample 64 Mb of rewritable storage, which would allow players to save things that they created. It had the ability to connect to the internet, to share those things. And, most important for the game that would become Animal Crossing, it had a real-time twenty- four-hour clock. This meant that a game could continue to operate on its own schedule, whether you were playing it or not. Something new could be happening whenever the player turned up.
This wasn’t the first time that Nintendo had released a disk-writing add-on for one of its consoles: the Famicom Disk System sold 4.4 million units in Japan between 1986 and 1990, and it is very fondly remembered there. You could bring a Famicom disk into a game shop and rewrite it for a fee on a charmingly retro-futuristic- looking kiosk machine, from which you could also fax high scores from the disks directly to Nintendo to participate in tournaments. You can still buy bright-yellow Disk System–themed holders for your metro or bank cards in Nintendo’s department stores, featuring its charming mascot, Diskun (Mr. Disk).
Nintendo made a big fuss about the 64DD when it was announced in 1996, showing a demo of a Zelda game that would become Ocarina of Time. But it was, in the end, one of Nintendo’s hardware failures. It was released in Japan only in December 1999 and discontinued in February 2001, having sold about 15,000 units. Almost all of the soft- ware that had been in development for it ended up being transmog- rified and released in some form on the N64 or the GameCube. This is what happened to Eguchi’s “communication game”: It appeared in 2001 on the N64 under the name Doubutsu no Mori, or Animal Forest, the last game ever released for that console. Unlike the hardware it was initially developed for, it did not become a footnote in Nintendo history. Instead, it became one of its slow-burn successes.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Image: Nintendo
Animal Forest is an odd game. Slightly eerie, even. You arrive as a vacant-eyed stranger in a strange place, the only human in a population of chattering animals, and immediately you are railroaded into purchasing a house from Tom Nook, an arch-capitalist tanuki landlord, whom you must then pay back bit by bit. Each player’s cartridge was home to a unique, individually generated town, with space for four people to build a home, decorate it, talk to the animals, send and receive letters, and go hunting for shells, insects, and fish around the rivers, trees, and beaches. That was it. You couldn’t finish Animal Forest; you couldn’t play it well or badly. You just kind of . . . existed within it, checking in every day to see what was happening in your virtual life, who was moving in and out of town, what special events were coming up on the calendar. It continued to exist whether you were there or not. Spend a long time away, and weeds would grow up around the village. Your neighbors would be shocked to see you upon your return.
It is astonishing how ahead of its time Animal Forest turned out to be. Technology took years to catch up with its ideas. That initial version of the game, later ported to the GameCube as Animal Crossing, sold just over two million units, but each time a new version of the game was released, it came into a world that was more suited to it. For a long time Animal Crossing was one of Nintendo’s lesser-known series, one of those deep cuts you could feel smug about importing. But by the time Wild World turned up on the Nintendo DS, in 2005, the idea of internet-enabled social gaming was becoming mainstream. That game sold almost twelve million. By 2012, when New Leaf came out on the 3DS, the concept of expressing yourself within a game and sharing your creations with others was, thanks to social media, also totally normal- ized. The result: thirteen million sales. And then, in March 2020, New Horizons was released the same month that much of the world went into lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. It offered community, creativity, relaxation, and connection to a world that was suddenly starved of all those things. It sold over forty-five million copies and became the dominant pop-cultural phenomenon of that dreadful time. Way back in 1986, Eguchi envisioned a game that might ease his loneliness. In 2020, New Horizons saved the whole world from loneliness. There are few more perfect illustrations of the power of video games.
By the late nineties, Katsuya Eguchi had settled in Kyoto. He had friends, colleagues, a wife and children. But now he had a new problem: He was often so busy at work that he didn’t have time to play video games together with his family. His wife played games, his children played games, but there was no way for them to play together if his children were already asleep by the time he got home from the office.
“I was sad that I couldn’t play games with my kids, even though I knew it would be fun,” Eguchi explained at a Nintendo company seminar in 2008. “From the beginning my idea was that, if this is the way it’s going to be, maybe there’s something we could do that would let someone in a similar situation to me come home late and play. And that would somehow overlap with what the kids had played.”
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