Animal Crossing began as a multiplayer dungeon crawler and shrank to a single village

Make a 'communication game' on a theme of playing with others, so a dad home late could overlap with his children's play.

A game that continues on its own clock, so a parent who gets home late can play on top of what the kids did earlier.

The first prototype, from around 1998, was a multiplayer RPG-like dungeon game where players left hints for each other and borrowed powers from animal companions. Planned for the 64DD, which had a real-time 24-hour clock, it had four seasonal islands with small dungeons. As the 64DD's fortunes waned, the team moved to the N64 cartridge, cut to one island and then dropped the adventure, leaving a village to live in. It came out in 2001 as Doubutsu no Mori (Animal Forest).

Animal Forest, later ported to GameCube as Animal Crossing, sold just over two million units. Wild World on the DS (2005) sold almost twelve million, New Leaf (2012) thirteen million and New Horizons (March 2020) over forty-five million, per Keza MacDonald's book excerpt in The Verge.

Katsuya Eguchi joined Nintendo in 1986 and moved to Kyoto, where he missed family and friends. By the late 1990s the problem was a different one: he was too busy to play games with his wife and children, who were asleep by the time he got home. Working with Hisashi Nogami and Takashi Tezuka on a theme of 'playing with others', he got the green light around 1998.

The prototype was nothing like Animal Crossing: a multiplayer dungeon adventure in which kids' progress left hints for their dad that night. The first sign of animals was players borrowing the powers of pets. When the 64DD faded, the planned four islands, one per season, could not fit on a cartridge, so the team made one island and then asked what players could do in a tiny village. 'Let's get rid of the adventure,' Nogami recalled. The result was Doubutsu no Mori in 2001.

The 64DD's real-time clock let a game keep running whether or not the player was there.

Cartridge space forced the team to shrink the world to a single island.

Without the adventure, the village itself, with its residents and daily events, became the experience.

When a constraint cuts the original scope, the stripped-down core can be the real product.

The excerpt traces the series from a lesser-known deep cut to a mainstream hit as online social play became normal, ending with New Horizons arriving the month much of the world went into COVID-19 lockdown.