The date is 23rd March 2020. The time is 8:30pm, and after celebrating my daughter’s eighth birthday with a small gathering of close family, the United Kingdom Government announced the first nationwide lockdown to tackle the Covid-19 outbreak. It was a sour way to end a great weekend, knowing we would not see any close relations for the foreseeable future, which would also include the birth of my youngest son in May of the same year. On the flipside, there was to be no travelling to work or school, with provisions in place to cater for both at home. What would follow would be less consequential late nights and last minute rises to work, coupled with my workplace adjusting to emergency arrangements being made to cater for the longer term of abandoned workplaces. The positive offset of this? More flexibility and, crucially, more self care time. Enter: Animal Crossing New Horizons.
The Nintendo Switch’s second best selling title likely owes a lot of its sales success to the Covid Lockdown period. Following its worldwide release just days earlier, New Horizons quickly became a lockdown phenomenon, selling an estimated five million copies digitally alone in the eleven days that remained of March 2020. It is also quickly became the perfect escape from what was a uncertain time outside of our own four walls. Covid cynics and sceptics, who also happened to be anti-video games, of which of course I am not, would accuse Nintendo of timing this release to push its sales as part of the overall Covid conspiracy that diseased their supposedly fully-functioning brains. Lets be honest, even if that was the case, it would have been absolutely genius move…..
As the reality of staying at home except for emergency shopping trips took hold, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Tom Nooks became my main tool of distraction; picking up shells (free money) from the beaches, digging up fossils to assess/sell, and taking those initial steps to upgrading the island’s faculties became the perfect pandemic placebo in between multiple lockdown-organising Microsoft Teams meetings. I’ll admit once the lockdown came to its first halt in the summer, I found it hard to go back; being riddled with a half-million Tom Nook housing -improvement debt became a real turn off. The capitalist crony landlord.
But that was then. Now, nearly four years on, my pre-teen daughter prompted me to re-install Tom Nook Debt Collector Simulator for herself in what is her first ever Animal Crossing experience. To say she is invested in Tom Nook’s Going to Break My Legs 5 is an understatement. As we’re on the same Switch console we share the same island, but I have given my daughter free reign to pursue the game as she sees fit. By doing so, she had made the island flourish.
With what money I had saved, more residents were attracted to increase that all important island rating, which in turn unlocks more of the games features. Now that terraforming has been unlocked, so has the potential of my daughter’s incredible designs and dedication. Decorated market places flood the centre of town, seamlessly linked by delicately created pathways to the permanent facilities of the island. Money trees have sprouted throughout the island to create a regular revenue stream with minimal effort.
My previous experience provided no allure for my daughter to its charms, instead NH was nothing more than a daily routine collection exercise to me. But now, with everything she has created, which has come from a greater work ethic and any effort of my own, and seeing such creativity come to fruition to create a thriving, digital landscape makes me a very proud father. Furthermore, it is proof than anything can simply be what you make and take from it.