Animal Crossing New Horizons: The Time I Was Seduced By Marketing

Good art should market itself. In a multi-billion dollar industry like video games it rarely ever gets the chance to. Companies care far less about quality as they do about moving units, especially marketing people as that is their entire job. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard stories behind these large-scale projects involving marketing people shooting down ideas from the creative side in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator, when ironically what they perceive to be a selling point ends up being detrimental to the artistic merit of the work. I’ve always been of the mindset that marketing-types should have a background in creativity first, business second as the creators would have far more respect for the decisions being made above them if they came from a more artful perspective.

When director Hidetaka Miyazaki and producer Takeshi Kaji (by my metrics the smartest producer of all time) presented their pitch of Demon’s Souls to the higher-ups at Sony they both intentionally misled the marketing team on the difficulty of the game, believing that they had to be sneaky in order to allow the project to be given the green light. Sony ended up passing on publishing the game internationally which studio executives regret to this very day. The idiosyncrasies of From Software won out over the conventionalist approach. Imagine if they had been honest from the get go. It is possible that the single most influential and important game series of the past decade may not have seen the light of day, or at the very least meddlesome marketers would have made the final product look drastically different than what we all know the Souls series to be.

Nintendo is a bit different than the typical entertainment company. A large portion of their creatives will at some point or another “graduate” to a supervisor role. Eiji Aonuma, Yoshiaki Koizumi, even Shigeru Miyamoto all at one point or another were primarily directors on numerous projects before donning the suit and being front and center for their respective areas in presentation. Sure, they didn’t always get it right, but it’s not hard to imagine their advisory input being more highly respected by the development team because of their previous experience in their positions.

And since we’ve established that Nintendo is different than your average gaming company, it should come as no surprise that it was through their marketing team that I was ultimately convinced to buy Animal Crossing New Horizons, having never played an Animal Crossing game prior.

I believe context is important here. The New Horizons hype had been riding high for months in the lead up to its release as it had been the first since New Leaf in 2013 on the 3DS and it was hard to not get a whiff of that and be interested as a result. It was also around the time the coronavirus pandemic really started to kick into gear and life started to become locked down and isolating on a large scale.

Like so many others, I also huddled in front of my laptop on that cold February morning, more out of a passing interest than any aggressive excitement, waiting for the Animal Crossing Direct that so many others were fiercely anticipating.

I was greeted by Tom Nook, the pantomime villain of the series to many an Animal Crossing player, gating their progress behind massive loan payments among many other large monetary investments explaining what would we explained in this three-part announcement sessions. A warm gentle and informative narration explaining what “Nook Inc.” had been planning to “present us” with followed soon after. 

This didn’t feel like a video game trailer, this was a travel agent explaining to me the benefits of a utopian lifestyle of my own creation. Island life that could look anyway I wanted populated with animals who only wanted the best and brightest for me and my time there, however long it may be. The ever-present sound of waves washing up against the shores, the gentle breeze of the spring that was soon to be upon us, blimey this place really is a paradise isn’t it? Or at least it can be, provided you put in the love and care required.

As the trailer continued and the islands showcased continued to grow not just in population but in detail and construction as well, I could feel myself starting to envision what might be on my island, what it might look like, who I might invite, signs that the game was gently and lovingly sinking it’s claws into my slow-morphing lizard consumerist brain. This wasn’t a game, it was a living breathing location welcoming me with opening arms in a loving 60 dollar embrace in a time where embracing others was advised against. “Nook Inc. is here for you” the trailer proudly exclaims, the childlike wonder and fun kicks into full gear, Nintendo is here for me when I needed them the most!

They got me. This company actually got me, a wry smile on my face. It was the creativity through which it delivered itself that wouldn’t let go. This was a deserted island getaway at a time we needed it most. Complete with perfect narration, cute anthropomorphic animal friends that actually want to see me, and a fake company that could’ve convinced me in that moment that they were as real and as genuine as any. I was bamboozled, and I wasn’t unhappy about it either. It took an extremely clever campaign full of shorthand, cheerful, fanciful presentation, and some gosh darn cute animals. If a company was going to catch me at a weak moment, I guess it’s not so bad that it was Nintendo.

Approximately 290 hours later (as of writing, I plan to play a lot more hours in the years to come) I can say that my time on paradise has been well spent. There are still more renovations and construction projects to come. Nook Inc. has been true to their word and delivered upon every promise they made when presenting the desert island package and then some. I still believe that good art will and should always market itself, even after this experience, and to those already aware of Animal Crossing’s pedigree it certainly did. But when a marketing team plays its cards as correctly as the New Horizons team did, even someone as marketing-averse as myself can’t help but be swept up in the spectacle. We’re all allowed a moment of weakness, right?