Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp apparently started life as a town planner

Unseen 64 contributor Liam Robertson has published a video suggesting the earliest iterations of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp were wildly different to the finished product. 

As some of you might remember, Pocket Camp (although it wasn't called that then) was first announced way back in April 2016, and was slated to release by Autumn that year. 

Of course, after various delays the game would eventually hit digital shelves in Autumn 2017, and Robertson claims that's because it had to be completely revamped. 

According to the self-styled video game historian, who says he spoke with people involved with development, the mobile effort initially began life as a totally different game called Animal Crossing: Town Planner. 

As that rather self-explanatory name implies, that early version of the game focused on getting players to lay down various buildings to please the town's animal inhabitants. 

Town Planner apparently featured very little interactive elements, and was "essentially a town builder with an Animal Crossing theme, with some small elements of economy management." On top of that, Players could also visit the towns of other players to see how they were stacking up. 

It's a wildly different pitch, and one that apparently wasn't very well received internally. Nintendo wasn't exactly smitten with what it saw, and felt that the menu-heavy game would struggle to keep players interested. So, it scrapped the idea and decided to take the project in a different direction.

You can find out more about the project by checking out the video above.