Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and an island called Island

This was my first Animal Crossing. I had heard of the series for years, but I never owned a GameCube and never owned a DS, so the games it lived on kept passing me by. We were mostly a PlayStation family growing up. I did have a Wii at one point, and I do not think there was ever an Animal Crossing for it that I could have played, so the whole thing just stayed in my periphery, a game I knew about and had never touched.

Then the Switch came along, Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched on March 20, 2020, and I started playing on March 21. The day after. That date is not an accident. The world was shutting down that exact week, everyone was suddenly home with nothing to do and a lot to be anxious about, and this gentle little island game arrived at the most precise right moment a game has ever arrived for an entire planet at once. I was not immune to it. I went in on day two and did not come up for air for months.

The nice thing about writing this now is that I do not have to trust my memory. I took pictures the whole way through, hundreds of them, using the camera the game gives you, and the Switch stamps every one with the exact date and time. So this is less a story I am telling from memory and more one I am reading back off the photos. They turned out to be a pretty good diary.

An island called Island

When you start the game, Tom Nook asks you to name your island, and the name is permanent, and you say it once and live with it forever. I named mine Island.

I would love to tell you there was a grand reason. There was not. I just thought it was funny, and a little honest, to have an island literally called Island. My character is a guy named Todd, same as me, and across the year he cycles through a beard and a rotating closet of dumb hats, but the island stayed Island the whole time.

Here is day one, the lonely yellow starter tent on bare ground, water on every side. Everything that follows grew out of this.

Building the lake

The thing I am proudest of, and the thing that took the longest by a mile, is the shape of the island itself. My whole goal was to make it mostly water. Every land mass in this game is technically an island, but I wanted mine to read like an atoll: a ring of land around a big body of water, with a few little islands sitting in the middle of that water. So I carved a giant lake into the center of the map and left one strong strip of land across the front, a kind of main street, where all the houses and shops line up.

This is the centerpiece, and it is exactly what I was going for: a tiny grass islet you reach by a log bridge, more flower-and-pine islets behind it, all of it floating in the middle of my own lake.

Doing this is brutal, by the way. Terraforming in this game means clearing every cliff by hand, rerouting every river and stream one tile at a time, and waiting on the game’s clock between steps. I built the lake early and then spent an enormous amount of time reshaping water that did not want to be reshaped. The aesthetic I was chasing was a Japanese garden: lots of trees, flowers, and bushes, stone paths, a red arched bridge, bamboo fencing, the works, but still functional, still a real town you could walk around. How much of an island can be nature and still work as a place to live.

A lot of the island ended up being formal little gardens like this one: rose beds laid out in neat color blocks, lanterns, a bench right at the cliff’s edge over the water.

You can see the whole plan on the island map. The big blue shape in the middle is the lake. The game even labels it with my name.

The town comes in

In those first weeks the island filled in fast, and the photos line up into a clean little construction timeline. The museum opened on March 24, with Blathers the owl moving in to take my fossils and bugs and fish. The first bridge went up on March 25, and the game throws a whole confetti ceremony for it, which absolutely got me the first time.

By April 1 the ramshackle Resident Services tent had become the proper brick town hall with the clock tower. Able Sisters, the tailor shop, opened April 3. Nook’s Cranny, the store, opened April 11, and a second bridge went up the same day. On April 18, K.K. Slider came and played a concert in the plaza, which is the game’s way of telling you your island has officially become a real, respectable place. I kept building bridges for a year, and the game kept throwing those ceremonies, and I kept showing up for every one.

The main street is where the Japanese-town look comes together: Nook’s Cranny and Able Sisters facing each other, a row of vending machines, a flag, brick paths, flower beds.

The neighbors

An island comes with neighbors: animal villagers who move into the houses along the front and wander around being themselves. What surprises me, looking back, is how stable my little cast turned out to be. Villagers come and go in this game, but most of mine showed up early and just never left, which is how I ended up with the same faces for years.

My two originals were Reneigh, a snooty horse with a pink mane and a permanent pair of sunglasses, and Sprocket, a jock ostrich built to look like a little robot, which is exactly why I spent years thinking of him as my robot duck. If you look back at that first-bridge photo, they are the two on the right catching confetti, there from the very beginning. Reneigh is still on the island today.

Here is the current lineup, straight off the island’s resident list:

So, the regulars. Reneigh the horse and Kitty, the older, elegant cat with the pink eyeshadow, hold down the snooty corner. Audie the wolf and Ace, an eager blue jay, bring the noise. Lolly is a sweet pale-blue kitten whose entire job is to be adorable, and Sally is a friendly orange squirrel I happened to photograph on the day she moved in, mid-sentence about how big a move it was for her. Samson is a tiny jock mouse, Zell a cool lavender deer, Wolfgang the resident cranky wolf, and Erik, a mellow antlered deer, is my most recent arrival.

A couple of them have stories. Audie is one of the most beloved villagers in the whole game, and for a sweet reason: Nintendo named her in honor of a real-life Animal Crossing player, a woman in her eighties who loved the series, and made her bubbly and warm to match. Given who I was spending most of my island time with, having a neighbor who was a tribute to an older player felt about right.

The cranky-wolf seat has changed hands over the years. These days it is Wolfgang, but back in 2021 it was a wolf named Fang, who I caught here looking enormously pleased with himself in a little crown: “Thanks, I feel spiffier already.”

When the whole town turns out for something, a bridge dedication, a holiday, you get the entire cast in one frame, confetti and all.

The calendar

The other thing the game does, and the thing I did not appreciate until I looked back, is that it kept time. In a year where every day at home blurred into the next, Animal Crossing had a calendar, and it made me show up for the seasons. There was a wedding season in June, where you help an alpaca couple named Reese and Cyrus shoot their wedding photos.

There was the Bug-Off, run by Flick the chameleon, where you race to net as many bugs as you can.

There was Festivale in February, with Pavé the peacock fanning out his rainbow tail in the plaza while everyone dances in the confetti.

And there were the quiet ones too: meteor showers you wish on, snow days, Shamrock Day where I dressed up like a leprechaun, the New Year. Real holidays were on hold that year, so the game’s holidays did a surprising amount of the work of marking time.

Mary

I cannot tell this story honestly without Mary. We had met that January in the revived Sims Online, right before all of this, and when Animal Crossing came out our friendship just moved in. For the back half of my pictures, she is everywhere. The game shows a little two-headed icon on the minimap when another player is on your island, and once you know to look for it, you can see exactly which days Mary came to visit. There are a lot of them.

We did everything together. We visited each other’s islands, traded fruit, ran the fishing and bug competitions side by side, and spent the holidays in the game when we could not spend them anywhere else. This is one of my favorite shots in the whole batch: the two of us standing at my central waterfall at night, under an aurora, the year both of us needed a friend.

Here we are out wishing on a meteor shower together, which, looking at it now, is a pretty good picture of what that whole stretch of 2020 and 2021 actually was: two people far apart, stuck inside, making wishes on a fake sky.

And here we are doing nothing at all, just parked in beach chairs by the pool on a spring afternoon, which honestly was the best part.

If you have read the Mary post, you know we eventually met in person, out in Washington. A lot of that friendship was built right here, on an island called Island.

Finishing it

I am a completion person, and Animal Crossing is a dangerous game to hand to a completion person. So I finished it. I caught every fish. I caught every bug. I dug up every fossil. The game hands out gold trophy tools when you complete each collection, and at some point I put them all on a wall together, which is about the most me thing I have ever done in a video game.

Once the museum is full and the collections are done, you do run out of game. For a while the updates kept things fresh, and then Nintendo basically said that was it, no more big content. The one paid expansion they put out was all about flying off to decorate vacation homes for other villagers, and I have to be honest, that is the one part of this game I have no interest in. I do not enjoy decorating a stranger’s house. I love decorating my own home and my own island, and I love taking a friend’s idea and running with it, but designing rooms for random characters I do not care about just is not the hook for me. I blew through that content and set it down.

What I actually wanted from an expansion was more island. Give me a bigger map. Give me an extension I could bolt onto one side that would force me to rethink my whole layout. That would have wrecked me in the best way. The other thing I would love is the ability to keep more than one island, so I could start fresh and feel those early days again, the days when you have no tools and no money and you are meeting your villagers one at a time, without losing the island I have put five or six years into. But you only get one island per console, and I am not the kind of person who bulldozes years of work to feel a beginning again. So Island stays Island.

Where it stands

My relationship with this game went through three phases, and you can see all three in the pictures. First it was a religion: every day, all day, the spring of 2020, because what else were you going to do. Then it became a job, the completionist grind to catch the last fish and fill the last shelf. And now it is a couple of times a year, which is genuinely a little sad, because I still love it. There is just nothing left to do.

This batch of photos happens to end right on the one-year mark, March 21, 2021. And it does not end with a party. It ends with my character relaxing in a hammock on the beach, next to a little campsite, the quietest possible note.

That feels right, actually. The island did its job. It gave a very strange year a shape, a calendar, and a place to be, and it gave me a year of afternoons with a friend I had just met. I keep hoping someone makes another Animal Crossing that grabs me the way this one did, at exactly the right time. Until then, Island is still out there, mostly water, waiting.