Excerpt

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.

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.