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Animal Crossing and Nintendo 64

While some of this may be common knowledge, there's some really interesting things about Animal Crossing that I didn't know about for a long time. For starters, most fans refer to the original title simply as "Animal Crossing for GameCube", but it does actually have a subtitle on the cover art, Population Growing. In addition, while this game is often associated with GameCube, that was actually not the first system to have a game in this series.


Animal Crossing: Population Growing was originally released on the Nintendo 64 as Dbutsu no Mori, which translates to Animal's Forest. This title was released only in Japan on April 14th, 2001, and was the very last official Nintendo release for the system. It was orginially inteded for the infamous 64DD disk drive expansion, but thankfully was assembled as a standard N64 cartridge once the 64DD project was dismissed as a failure.


There were a few notable enhancements for the re-release on GameCube, occurring later that same year. The Nintendo 64 did not have an internal clock, so the clock was placed inside of the game cartridge instead. For those who aren't familiar with hardware, this meant that time was only ticking while the game was being played. However, once the GameCube arrived with it's built in internal clock, Nintendo decided to take advantage of this new system feature. Now that the clock was on the system instead of the cartridge, the game could play itself while the player was away. This feature has become a huge staple among Animal Crossing games, and even coined the games slogan, "the real life game that's playing, even when you're not".


It's always interesting how commercially successful games play out, and it makes me wonder how it could've been if just a few things went a tiny bit differently. Would Animal Crossing still be the successful franchise it is today if it was originally released with the 64DD as planned? Did Nintendo consider the impact that the GameCube's internal clock feature would have for their games, or was it an ingenious afterthought that worked in their favor? Obviously we'll never know, but I'm glad this game grew the way it did, and I'm very excited for the upcoming New Horizons release on March 20th, 2020.

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