Years before Animal Crossing became a global success, Nintendo warned its localisation team how “difficult” it would be to make the game work outside of its native Japan.
Speaking to Time Extension, Nintendo localization manager Leslie Swann said bosses cautioned that the English-language launch of Animal Crossing, then titled Animal Forest, would be a huge job due to the sheer amount of in-game text within the title, as well as its numerous Japan-specific cultural references and items.
Indeed, Swan remembered then-Nintendo president Satoru Iwata discovering her team was working on bringing the notoriously odd and text-heavy game would be launched outside of Japan — something that left him in disbelief.
“We knew of Animal Forest, but we hadn’t really dinked around with it — we usually would get the Japanese versions of games and play through them,” Swann recalled. “But we hadn’t really messed around with that one very much. So, anyway, [Takashi Tezuka, Nintendo executive officer] basically said to me, ‘We’d like to have you localize it’ and I said, ‘Sure.’
“But then he said, ‘No, Leslie, I’m not sure you understand, it’s going to be difficult.’ And I kept having to assure him that we would make it happen.”
Animal Crossing’s earliest incarnation, known as Animal Forest, launched for N64 in April 2001 and never made it outside of Japan. It was only when the game was given an expanded GameCube launch that the decision was made to localise the title elsewhere — and even then, its arrival around the world took years.
“A month or two later, I was in a meeting with Mr. Iwata and some other heads of the development group,” Swan recalled, “and we were just kind of going around saying, ‘Here’s what we’re going to be working on,’ and I just said, ‘Well, Mr. Tezuka is asking us to work on Animal Forest’ and he just burst out in laughter. He just laughed and said, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to do this.’ And it’s true, just everything in that game was so specific to Japan.”
Swann’s team had to rename every character, determine each character’s catchphrase and localise the game’s calendar of in-game events to make sense to a more global audience. Other work involved sifting through the game’s inventory of items to ensure everything made sense for players outside of Japan.
“I can’t tell you the number of hours we spent on that game, all hands on deck,” Swann continued. “We were so lucky at that point that we didn’t have other big projects, as we pretty much had the entire staff dedicated to that game.
“Everybody would get together in a room and we would say, ‘Okay, today we’re going to rename all the furniture in this set,’ or ‘Today we’re going to work on names for these characters and their catchphrases.’ Then, after this, we would submit all this stuff to our legal department who had to clear everything because our thought from the beginning was if this is big, then we’re going to want to make merchandise.”
Even the game’s name, Animal Crossing, went through various changes before launch — with some suggestion it might include ‘Forest’ in the title before it was ultimately dropped.
“It must have been at least six months or maybe a year for us to clear the name Animal Crossing,” Swan concluded. “I remember we had so many other names that we were in love with and then we would be crushed when they would be rejected. My favourite was ‘Animal Acres,’ because the grids of the town lent themselves to being called acres. But again, that didn’t clear.”
For more from Swann on her career, including her work on Nintendo Power magazine and how she ended up voicing Princess Peach for years, the full Time Extension interview is well worth a read.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
