Late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata pushed for everyone at Nintendo to experience Animal Crossing: New Leaf prior to its release.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf is one of the highest-selling games on the Nintendo 3DS with over 13 million copies sold. A rarity for 3DS titles, the cutesy city management game outsold its DS predecessor.
In the latest episode of the Back Page Podcast, former Nintendo PR manager Ashely Day revealed that there was an immense push behind-the-scenes for employees to truly understand the value of the 3DS game before its launch.
“There was a very unusual push behind-the-scenes to make this a success,” Day revealed. “This came from the top. This came from Iwata. Certainly in Europe, I don’t know what it was like in the States or in Japan, but every single employee at Nintendo Europe and all of its subsidiaries was given a free copy of New Leaf months before the game came out.”
Day explained that, as a Nintendo employee at the time, this was very “unusual”. While employees would often receive free games on their official release, workers were very rarely given a copy of a game prior to its launch.
“Iwata made a point and said, ‘I want everyone, it’s now your job to play New Leaf, like play it every day’… he wanted people to understand at Nintendo what it was like to play Animal Crossing habitually.”
As it turns out, Iwata’s idea worked and employees at Nintendo were not only playing Animal Crossing daily, but understanding what made the series great. Whether or not that led to additional sales will never be truly known, but it was a special time for the company, at least in Europe.
“He was right,” Day said. “It was amazing to see, like, some of the older generation of sales people who were in their late 50s and didn’t really touch games all that much suddenly became ultra obsessed with Animal Crossing and they were trading on the Animal Crossing stock market and making clothes.”
To see normal people in suits talking about Animal Crossing on a daily basis was like this weird thing that proved how special it was. And it translated into the marketing and the sales and the game was in fact a huge success in part because of that innovative internal push.”
Nintendo’s next Animal Crossing game, the Switch follow-up New Horizons, would end up being the most popular game in the series by far. That game is the second-highest selling Nintendo Switch game of all time with over 50 million units sold, but a lot of its charm is based on what the team accomplished with New Leaf.
Right now, fans are holding out hope for a new game in the series, although it’s not clear that Nintendo’s plans are. Can we expect more updates for New Horizons? Is a sequel on the way? Nobody really knows. Well, nobody outside of Nintendo, that is.
