Animal Crossing is now one of Nintendo’s biggest franchises worldwide, but obviously that wasn’t always the case. It took years for the first game to even release outside of Japan, and then slowly but surely, the franchise started to gain recognition. The goal was to help Animal Crossing reach even further with the release of Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and the president of Nintendo took an extra step to ensure its success.
In a chat with the Back Page Podcast, Ashley Day, former PR and social media manager at Nintendo UK, revealed that the late Satoru Iwata gave everyone at Nintendo Europe a copy of Animal Crossing: New Leaf prior to its launch. That gifted copy came with one caveat; employees had to play it every single day to better understand the franchise.
“There was a very unusual push behind-the-scenes to make this a success. This came from the top. This came from Iwata. Certainly in Europe, I don’t know what it was like in the States or in Japan, but every single employee at Nintendo Europe and all of its subsidiaries was given a free copy of New Leaf months before the game came out.
Iwata made a point and said, ‘I want everyone, it’s now your job to play New Leaf, like play it every day’… he wanted people to understand at Nintendo what it was like to play Animal Crossing habitually.
He was right. It was amazing to see, like, some of the older generation of sales people who were in their late 50s and didn’t really touch games all that much suddenly became ultra obsessed with Animal Crossing and they were trading on the Animal Crossing stock market and making clothes. To see normal people in suits talking about Animal Crossing on a daily basis was like this weird thing that proved how special it was. And it translated into the marketing and the sales and the game was in fact a huge success in part because of that innovative internal push.”
[Ashley Day, former PR and social media manager at Nintendo UK]
It seem the plan worked, as the well-informed staffers helped Animal Crossing: New Leaf become the 6th best-selling 3DS game worldwide. The installment moved over 13 million units during its lifespan, and it helped the franchise grow exponentially from there on out.