Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ anniversary

The snow has finally melted, and I’m able to step outside to dig for fossils without bundling up in a jacket and winter hat. It’s T-shirt weather, and spring means my Animal Crossing: New Horizons island feels more alive. There are bugs chirping and more fish in the lakes and sea. Even my cute little animal neighbors seem more lively. But the change in weather also signals that I’ve been playing this game for an entire year. I’ve seen seasons, holidays, wildlife, and even other players and villagers come and go. In some ways, New Horizons isn’t the same game as the one I started playing in 2020. But for the most part, it’s almost identical. So why am I still playing?

When I wrote my original review of New Horizons last March, I’d spent around two weeks with the game. I called it a slow burn, even by the plodding standards of the Animal Crossing series. I also said its pacing was “an acquired taste.” Turns out, I was very wrong, at least for a certain portion of the audience who were able to bend the game to their will. With everyone stuck indoors, New Horizons turned into a bingeable experience, with seemingly everyone racing to pay off their mortgage and “complete” the game as fast as possible. The stalk market exploded. Time travel became acceptable. There were talk shows and celebrity appearances that came and went. The result was that a lot of players, or at least most of the people I know, burned out after a few weeks or months.

“Where have you been all this time?”

A wave of guilt washed over me as I read these words on the screen. Considering how 2020 dismantled our reality and created a new set of post-coronavirus social paradigms, the last thing I wanted was to explain myself to someone I thought would understand.

I never play Animal Crossing: New Horizons on mute. I love hearing the grass crunching under my character’s shoes, the cutesy language that all of the villagers speak, and, of course, the sound effects tied to all of the emotes, like the signature piano noise that plays right before you’re about to get messed up by a bunch of angry bees.

But what makes the game really worth listening to closely is the music — specifically K.K. Slider’s tunes. He’s the king of cool, a crooning pup star among a bunch of normies that inhabit your island. And for the kind of dreadful year that 2020 was shaping up to be when New Horizons released, hearing K.K. Slider’s work was a beam of positivity that took me and my apartment over completely.

“The serendipity of the time [Animal Crossing: New Horizons] came out is ridiculous,” says Lex Roberts, curator of the UK National Videogame Museum’s Animal Crossing Diaries. The project aims to capture “the cultural phenomenon that followed the release of Animal Crossing … in March 2020, just as the world was transformed by the pandemic.”

New Horizons has been inextricably associated with COVID-19, with early reviews making mention of how much we all needed an escape as lockdowns and quarantines suddenly became our lives. As it became apparent that social distancing would be around for a long time, the game became the location of weddings, memorials, protests, and political campaigning, to name just a few.

It might be hard to believe, but Animal Crossing: New Horizons celebrates its first anniversary this week. Ahead of the game’s launch last March, producer Hisashi Nogami told The Verge that he hoped players would be able to “use this as an escape.” And in a year filled with challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, New Horizons’ colorful island and charming animal friends proved to be exactly that, offering a much-needed respite from the difficulties of the real world.

The game wasn’t only fun on day one, though. Nintendo has continually added new content and events to the game, and the community gave birth to a number of fun, hilarious, and even political moments throughout the year. For many players, New Horizons became more of a place than a game.