Animal Crossing began life as a dungeon crawler

Despite the complex journey between concept and final product, and despite all the many things that change between a prototype and whatever ends up in players’ hands, something of the initial feeling that inspired the video game always remains. If you know what you’re listening to, it’s easy to hear the echo of that original idea. Pokémon was born from her fascination with the creatures, and Zelda was born from a longing for the freedom of childhood. Meanwhile, Animal Crossing was born out of loneliness.

Katsuya Iguchi left his native Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, to join Nintendo in 1986. He found it difficult to adjust to living in Kyoto. “When I moved… I left my family and friends behind,” he said. edge “In doing so, I realized that being close to them – being able to spend time with them, talk to them, play with them – was wonderful and important. I had wondered for a long time if there was a way to recreate that feeling, and that was the impetus behind the original Animal crossing“.

Eguchi had a long career at Nintendo, where he was a level designer Super Mario Bros 3 and Yoshi’s storyAnd manager on Star Fox and Wave racing 64– before he had the chance to explore his idea of ​​the “communication game” in the late 1990s. Nintendo was working on adding a floppy drive for the N64, called the 64DD. Its discs had 64MB of rewritable storage, allowing players to save things they created. He had the ability to go online and share that stuff. And most important for the game it would become Animal crossingIt had a real time clock of twenty-four hours. This means that the game can continue to run on its own schedule, whether you are playing it or not. Something new may happen whenever the player appears.

This wasn’t the first time Nintendo had released a disc-writing add-on for one of its consoles: the Famicom Disk System sold 4.4 million units in Japan between 1986 and 1990, and is still remembered very fondly. You can bring a Famicom disc into a game store and have it rewritten for a fee at a charmingly futuristic-looking kiosk machine, from which you can also fax high scores from the discs directly to Nintendo for tournaments. You can still buy bright yellow Disc System-themed holders for your MetroCards or bank cards at Nintendo department stores, featuring the charming mascot Diskun (Mr. Disk).

Nintendo made a lot of noise about the 64DD when it was announced in 1996, showing a demo of the 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 was discontinued in February 2001, after selling about 15,000 units. Almost all of the software that was in development for it ended up being converted and released in some form on the N64 or GameCube. This is what happened to Iguchi’s “communication game”: it appeared in 2001 on the N64 under the name Dobutsu no morior Forest animalsthe last game ever released for this console. Unlike the hardware it was initially developed for, it did not become a footnote in Nintendo’s history. Instead, it became one of her slow successes.

Forest animals It’s a strange game. A bit strange, even. You arrive as a vacant-eyed stranger in a strange place, the only human in a group of chatty animals, and are immediately thrust into buying a house from Tom Nook, a capitalist tanuki landlord, which you must then pay off bit by bit. Each player’s cartridge was home to a unique, individually created town, with room for four people to build a house, decorate it, talk to animals, send and receive messages, and go searching for shells, insects, and fish around rivers, trees, and beaches. That was it. You can’t finish Forest animals; You can’t play well or poorly. You’re just kind of… . . Inside, you can log in each day to see what’s been happening in your virtual life, who’s been moving in and out of town, and what special events are coming up on the calendar. And it continues to exist whether you are there or not. If you spend too much time away, weeds will grow around the village. Your neighbors will be shocked to see you when you return.

It is amazing how ahead of its time Forest animals It turned out to be. It took years for technology to catch up with her ideas. This initial version of the game was later ported to the GameCube as Animal crossingsold just over two million units, but every time a new version of the game was released, it came to a world more suited to it. For a long time, Animal Crossing has been one of Nintendo’s lesser-known game series, one of those deep cuts you’d feel proud to have imported. But by the time The wild world The idea of ​​online social gaming appeared on the Nintendo DS in 2005 and became mainstream. That game sold nearly twelve million. By 2012, when New paper The concept of expressing yourself in-game and sharing your creations with others came to life on the 3DS, and has also become completely normalized thanks to social media. The result: thirteen million sales. And then, in March 2020, New horizons It was released in 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 hungry for all of these things. It sold over forty-five million copies and became the dominant popular cultural phenomenon of that apocalyptic time. In 1986, Iguchi conceived of a game that might alleviate his feelings of loneliness. In 2020, New horizons Save the whole world from loneliness. There are few perfect illustrations of the power of video games.

By the late 1990s, Katsuya Iguchi had settled in Kyoto. He had friends, colleagues, a wife and children. But now he faced a new problem: he was often so busy at work that he didn’t have time to play video games with his family. His wife played games, his kids played games, but there was no way for them to play together if his kids were already asleep when he got home from the office.

“I felt sad that I couldn’t play games with my kids, even though I knew they would be fun,” Iguchi explained at a Nintendo seminar in 2008. “From the beginning my idea was that if this was the way things were going to go, maybe there was something we could do that would allow someone in a similar situation to me to come home late and play. This would somehow interfere with what the kids played.”

Working with the theme of “playing with others”, Iguchi collaborated with Hisashi Nogami and Takashi Tezuka, and got the go-ahead to start compiling the game around 1998. The prototype they developed looked nothing like it Animal crossing. It was a multiplayer dungeon crawler adventure game.

“The beginning of this design was to have this role-playing-like world in this huge arena, and a lot of people would enter, and your play would impact other players… For example, let’s say the kids were venturing into a dungeon during the day and got some way through it, but then they got to a point where they couldn’t get past it. When Dad got home at night, he could use the information the kids left as a hint, clear the dungeon, and move on. I wondered what this kind of relay-type play would be like.”

The only contact with him Animal crossing In this prototype – apart from the idea of ​​playing together – players could bring their pets with them on their adventures. “There are a lot of RPGs where you become the hero, but in the game I was imagining, the player was helpless,” Iguchi explained. “So I thought, well, what the player can’t do alone, they can borrow the power of animals to overcome them. This is the first time the idea of ​​animals has been brought up in this project… There was not even a hint of being able to have conversations with animals at that time.” You could only get this far using your animal powers; At some point, you will need help from another player, hence the social aspect of the game.

It was 64DD’s dwindling fortunes that forced the team to change course. “During our original planning phase, the field was incredibly large… There will be four different islands – one for each of the four seasons, and each island will have small dungeons that you can venture into,” Nogami explained. “Of course, something is too big to fit (on a Nintendo 64 cartridge), so we thought well – let’s make it one (island).”

“But then we asked ourselves, what can players enjoy in such a small village?” Iguchi interjected.

“We thought you couldn’t really have an adventure now, could you?” Nogami replied. “So we said okay. Let’s get the adventure out of the way.”

Adapted from: Super Nintendo by Keiza McDonald
Copyright © 2026 by Keza McDonald. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a Knopf Doubleday Group company, a division of Penguin Random House LLC