How Animal Crossing Saved Us – The Special Spring of New Horizons
Animal Crossing New Horizons saved us. To many of us, it feels like life stopped in 2020 and never started again. There’s a sensation that time passes in a distorted manner now; that the past 5 years have sped past in the blink of an eye. With this in mind, there’s no more fitting game to talk about than Animal Crossing New Horizons, which is all about the passing of time, and the fact that New Horizons came out 5 whole years ago now. And, frankly, most of us are still in debt to that dastardly raccoon who tied us down with mortgages on an island that I’m pretty sure isn’t even his…. ANYWAY, join me as we remember the special spring of animal crossing New Horizons on its 5th anniversary, and dive into how the game not only got us through a dark time but literally saved lives.
Animal Crossing has always been a popular game to a small niche of individuals who enjoy playing games that are more cozy life simulator than video game. There’s something extremely appealing in diving into a game whose theme is to leave the rat race and anxiety of daily life behind, move to a new place, and start all over again. But this time with cutesy and kooky characters for neighbours, instead of that annoying family upstairs who seem to be tapdancing in cowboy boots 24/7.
That’s why games like Stardew Valley reached astronomical popularity levels, because we can all relate. The problem with Animal Crossing, however, is that it has always been locked away on Nintendo consoles, meaning a significant chunk of the gaming community has never had access to the franchise. That’s especially so when you consider the fact that Nintendo has always split their audience in two: half of their players using Nintendo home consoles and half using Nintendo handhelds. But, in March of 2020, the perfect storm happened when New Horizons launched, blowing expectations out of the water for a multitude of reasons. But before we can get too deep into that just yet, we have to go back to the year 2012 to find out why 2020 was the most important year in Animal Crossing history.
This was the year that Animal Crossing New Leaf for the Nintendo 3DS launched. It was the first Animal Crossing game in 4 years, with it being preceded by the Nintendo Wii’s Animal Crossing City Folk in 2008. This iteration of the cozy life simulator had your player character take on the role of mayor in a town that you’d just moved to, which was just the first in a series of changes for the series. City Folk received excellent review scores and subsequently sold a whopping 13 million copies. To put that in perspective, that’s the most copies sold out of any of the previous Animal Crossing games since the series started on the GameCube in 2001. What’s even more interesting is that this game was solely on the handheld 3DS.
So, while the franchise seemed to be on the up and up, between 2012 and 2020, there were no proper mainline entries in the Animal Crossing series. Yes, Happy home designer and Amiibo festival both launched in 2015, but both of these games were gimmicky spin-offs that focused on designing houses and selling amiibo. They received poor reviews, and Animal Crossing players were generally pretty disappointed in how the series was shaping up. Due to the poor sales of the Wii U, fans weren’t sure whether they would ever get another proper Animal Crossing game again, or when that might even be.
8 years after New Leaf, then, New Horizons was, well, on the horizon, and fans were excited, but a last minute problem reared its ugly head and seemed like it might scupper Nintendo’s plans to reinvigorate the beloved series once again. That’s right, I’m talking about the spicy cough, the big C. Not only did it hit the world in full force in March, but along with it shut down global manufacturing and logistics, which meant that physical copies of games and hardware were in very short supply. It could have all gone so wrong for Nintendo, except it didn’t. In fact, it turns out that gamers being locked in their houses for months was the best thing that could have happened to Animal Crossing.
See, Animal Crossing New Horizons ended up being the perfect antidote to the craziness of what was happening around us at the time. On March 20th, 2020, we all embarked on our own adventure to a remote desert island, where we were greeted by Tom Nook and company, who let us set up camp there. Not only was Animal Crossing New Horizons a great game, but its structure was also particularly relevant. Anxiety and depression were rife in the spring of 2020, and because Animal Crossing plays out in real date and time in-game, New Horizons drip fed us tasty morsels every day that kept us coming back. Tom Nook needs a new visitor centre, you can build a better house, the town needs a bridge, you need to catch a fish that’s only out at night time. All of this served to help us deal with what was, universally, a difficult time. And because of social media, it felt magical.
Apps like Twitter and forums like Reddit were full of cooperative players trying to help each other out. Before all of the game guides had rooted out every single secret to the game, everyone was sharing advice on what to build first or how many days it took for this or that construction to finish, or talking about how and when Gulliver washes ashore. People were advertising turnip prices and visiting each other’s islands to get the best deal. While there had been features like this in previous Animal Crossing games, everything came together perfectly for New Horizons. The Switch was in its prime, and Nintendo had united both its handheld and home console audiences in one device, so no matter the game, we would all be playing it. Then you have the fact that Nintendo had made a concerted effort to really add multiplayer capabilities this generation with Nintendo Switch Online. Sprinkle in the sheer hype of a new Animal Crossing game and you have a recipe for astonishing success.
Nintendo also released a limited edition pastel coloured New Horizons Switch, which was almost impossible to find. Personally, I sat refreshing internet store pages for weeks before I got one – and I never want to go through that again, let me tell you. But it wasn’t just special editions that were hard to get hold of. Players couldn’t even find physical cartridge copies of the game because of the shipping and manufacturing issues we spoke about earlier, so most people resorted to paying the inflated eshop price to be in on the once-in-a-lifetime- phenomenon that was the New Horizons launch. All of these factors coalesced into New Horizons being the second most successful Nintendo Switch game to date, which to this day puts it only narrowly behind Mario Kart 8. The game sold a monumental 44 million copies worldwide, which is around 15 million more than Breath of the Wild.
What we really need to touch on, though, is the intangible factors of the special spring of Animal Crossing. In March of 2020, we were in a dark and scary place, there’s no doubt about that. As gamers, we’re used to being trapped in our houses pursuing our hobby voluntarily, but what we really didn’t expect was for a capitalist raccoon to come and save the day – yet he did. Personally, I didn’t really know I needed an uplifting, fun game until I decided to give in to the hype and buy New Horizons when the internet went crazy for it. Heck, I hadn’t even played an Animal Crossing game before. Don’t look at me like that.
In the five years since the game’s release, lots of stories have come out about how special New Horizons was to them at the time. Some people say it helped them grow closer to their partners as they built an island together, while the National Video Game Museum in the UK put together an Animal Crossing exhibition specifically about how the game helped us through those dark times by collecting diaries and artifacts from across the world. In the exhibit, players talk about how the game helped them keep a routine in a routineless world, stay in touch with friends and family, or share their creativity so they didn’t go bananas. It only takes a trip to Reddit to really hammer home just how important it was for a new (and good) Animal Crossing game to drop when it did, with most users saying that the game literally saved their lives. And I’m sure you and I can agree with that sentiment.
It’s hard not to look back with nostalgia to that special spring of Animal Crossing. It was a time that marked the end of one era and the beginning of a new one, and at the time we were still quite naive to just how the world would change. But what’s so special about New Horizons is that most of us still have our original save games, which means that on hard drives all over the world, our islands are still how we left them when we last logged in 1, 2, 3, even 5 years ago. It’s a very real nostalgic museum of the times we lived in, and that fact is both fascinating and sad when you dedicate some thought to it. Many players will never go back to their games now, but their island and its inhabitants live on, as well as the real relationships formed in real time many moons ago.
I can’t help but wonder, what’s next for Animal Crossing? It’s been 5 years and the Switch 2 is here, so when will we see another game? Will it be set on an island or in a town? And could it possibly live up to the sales and legacy of New Horizons? Whatever happens, one thing is true: the special spring of New Horizons will be forever etched into our memories as a special game that came at a special time, and we’ll all look back with complicated feelings for money years to come. It was a wonderful game that brought us all together, saving our sanities (or in some cases lives), and will be forever cemented as a seminal moment in gaming history.
