These Commercials Are The Reason I Started Playing Animal Crossing.

I’d seen mention of the game in various magazines, but never really paid much attention to it until these TV spots started airing. Everything was just too bizarre (“Nice outfit. Where’d you get it, a garbage dump?” “Uh, yeah!”) to ignore. And the idea of game that functioned even while you weren’t playing seemed crazy to me. I had to have it.

This was back in 2002. I’d just graduated high school, got kicked out of my parents’ house, and was living with some friends. None of us had jobs or any sort of responsibilities at the time, so after I got Animal Crossing, so did everyone else in the house. It was all we did for months.

In just a few weeks after we all started playing, the Animal Crossing virus had spread to our circle of friends outside the house. Soon enough, everyone was coming over with their memory cards to visit each others’ towns, steal fruit, and trade furniture. We even had an Animal Crossing News Year’s Eve party where we celebrated the in-game fireworks countdown twice in two different rooms because the GameCube’s internal clocks were a few seconds apart.

While I still like the new Animal Crossing games, I don’t think anything will ever compare to the experiences I had with the first one. Going on a tropical island getaway just by hooking my GBA to my GameCube, getting new items from eReader cards, having K.K. Slider sing to me in front of the train station, playing old NES games, fishing for hours to pay off my debt so I could beat all my friends in getting the golden statue of myself in my town, rushing home from my real-life job so that I could turn on my town’s lighthouse - these are all some of my fondest gaming memories ever and it makes me a bit sad to know none of the more recent Animal Crossing games have made me feel the same way.

Still… I can’t fucking wait for the 3DS version.

(Source: youtube.com)