So the fascination in playing the mobile version of Animal Crossing is to see if the old master can teach us any new tricks? You could play for very short periods of time if you wanted to, and you were incentivised to help other players and vice versa. The game rewarded you for coming back many times a day rather than playing a longer session. What Nintendo had not predicted was that the game mechanics introduced in this game were a perfect fit for casual web and mobile games of the future. Again perfect for families who had one machine between them but who would use it at different times of the day. This meant you were incentivized to visit nearby towns to trade items and leave messages, and you might often have a father switch on the game to find out his daughter had visited his town and left him some items. The series also introduced the concept of social mechanics years before they found home in web, Facebook and eventually mobile games. Multiple Town instances could be stored on one cart, meaning that multiple family members could maintain their own town on a single machine. And this was in an era where micro-transactions did not exist, so you would have to come back later if you wanted more items, there was no shortcut around it! So in this sense, Animal Crossing was one of the first games that encouraged you to play a couple of times every day rather than playing for one huge session, making it more appealing to families, which is Nintendo’s key demographic. The game even had a currency called Bells which functioned in a sense as a soft currency for the game. after knocking down some fruit from a tree, you’d have to wait a couple of hours before it grew back again. The game also rationed out some items and content by forcing you to wait a certain amount of time. You would have to play the game at specific times of the day to attend activities such as fishing tournaments and early-morning fitness classes, which occurred on a regular schedule. But more importantly than that, Animal Crossing was the first mainstream game to introduce us to timer mechanics in games.Īnimal Crossing was famous for using the console’s internal clock to trigger in game tasks and events. This meant that there often tasks or goals that showed up at the same time as real-life events and holidays such as Independence Day, Halloween, the Harvest Festival (Thanksgiving), and Toy Day (Christmas). Also unique for the game at the time was that the game utilised the console’s internal clock to observe days, weeks, months and years. You move your character around a 3D world, but can do whatever you want, be it exploring, talking to the town's residents, catch fish or hunt bugs. The “aim” of the game, if there really is one, is to fulfill various tasks and goals, trying to make the town flourish and it’s residents happy. The game is open-ended, with players assuming the role of a new mayor in the town of Animal Crossing. It has been described as a social simulator and even as a “communication game" by Nintendo themselves. The Original Animal Crossingįor it’s time, the Animal Crossing franchise was unique and introduced a previously unseen style of game on home consoles. ^ Console and Handheld versions of Animal Crossing involved you exploring a town, meeting it’s residents and completing various tasks. How will the Animal Crossing mobile game compare to the mobile titles of today, which took core gameplay aspects from the console original and improved upon them? Thus it’s a fascinating case study to see this game go full circle. In terms of design, Animal Crossing inspired “Invest and Express” style mobile games of today such as Hay Day, Township, Farmville, etc due to its pioneering use of appointment mechanics and utilizing real life time and dates. Though some way short of the Super Mario (311m), Mario Kart (110m) and Zelda (86m) franchises, it’s comfortably ahead of the Fire Emblem (10m) and Metroid (17m) franchises in terms of sales.Īnimal Crossing was a very unique game when it was first released on the Nintendo 64 back in 2001 and the franchise’s debut on mobile is very poignant. ^ At over 30 million copies sold, Animal Crossing is a big franchise for Nintendo. So how does the first mobile entry stack up? Whilst not as heavy hitting an IP as Mario or Zelda, Animal Crossing has been a huge success for Nintendo over the years, having sold over 30 million copies at retail. Nintendo recently launched their third mobile game, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. Make sure to sign up to the weekly Deconstructor of Fun newsletter!
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