Localizing video games can be challenging, and in the case of Animal Crossing, bringing the distinctly Japanese social-sim to the West in 2002 proved to be a Herculean labor. One of the big obstacles was renaming the game, as its Japanese title of Dōbutsu no Mori had to be changed for its Western release.
The entire localization job took between six months and a year to complete, former Nintendo of America localization manager Leslie Swan said to Time Extension, and one of the proposed titles was Animal Acres, a name that was inspired by the grids of the town. This was ultimately rejected by Nintendo, with the title of Animal Crossing being approved instead.
The late Satoru Iwata–who was the head of Nintendo’s corporate planning division at that time–laughed when he heard that Swan and her team were working on the English localization. Game producer Takashi Tezuka had also warned the team about taking on the task, as they’d need to not only translate thousands of lines of text, but also rename characters, come up with new catchphrases for them, and figure out how to adapt Japanese-specific themes for Western audiences.
“I was in a meeting with Mr. Iwata and some other heads of the development group, 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,” Swan said. “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.”
The last Animal Crossing game, New Horizons, was released in 2020 and it recently got a Switch 2 update. The future of the franchise remains a mystery–even in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic helping to turn New Horizons into a massive hit for Nintendo–but you can bring the game and your favorite villagers everywhere with you as Animal Crossing Crocs are now available to order.
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