Book Excerpt: Animal Crossing tracks the rise of the original cozy life sim

The following excerpt is from Animal Crossing by Kelsey Lewin. The book was published August 15, 2024, and is available from Boss Fight Books. Use discount code TOMNOOK for 10% off your purchase.

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 Studio^[1]—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 World^[2] 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.^[3]

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.

^[1] "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.

^[2] Nintendo's video game exhibition and press event that ran from 1989 to 2001. From 1989-1996 it was called "Shoshinkai."

^[3] Schneider went on to give Mario Artist Talent Studio a review of 8.2/10—he actually loved it!

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 Seminar^[4]. "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 world^[5] 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 GDC^[6] 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 Diablo^[7] 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.

^[4] Nintendo Game Seminars were the evolution of Nintendo Dentsu Game Seminars—yearly educational events to help game design students learn from Nintendo veterans.

^[5] A virtual world which continues to exist and develop even when no people are interacting with it.

^[6] Game Developers Conference, a long-running industry conference marked by hundreds of panels, talks, and seminars from game industry professionals of all types.

^[7]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.

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:

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 Tezuka^[1]. 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.

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.^[2] 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 staff^[3] 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.

^[1] 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.

^[2] 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.

^[3] 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.