Animal Crossing New Horizons Three Year Anniversary

 Has it really already been three years since Animal Crossing New Horiozons launched? 

Feels just like yesterday that I was counting down the days after the E3 2019 reveal and subsequent delay to March 20th, 2020. The floodgates were open and Nintendo would finally begin to share info on the game in the months that followed, culminating in a huge info dump in early 2020 with an Animal Crossing Direct nearly a month prior to release.

While the game was always destined to be a mammoth hit coming off the success of New Leaf, plus with the added number of Swtich consoles sold at that point, no one could have predicted the suffocating presence the game would go on to have all over the world; It became so big that fast food joints, furniture manufacturers and even the presidential nominees at the time were all up in the game's business, using its unavoidable popularity by creating towns as means to impress potential voters to get out and vote(Which Nintendo did not take kindly to).

2020 was a pretty wild to say the least. The coronavirus pandemic that was officially declared in late March is still ongoing as of the time of this entry and doesn't show any sign of ending any time soon. It was because of the pandemic when lockdown began (which did not happen in America, unfortunately) that Animal Crossing's arrival was greatly lauded by a whole bunch of people, because at its core Animal Crossing is a game about connecting and socializing, and in a world that we simply could not congregate safely, it allowed for friends and family to get together again safely. Heck, some players even held their weddings in-game after the real-world events had to be cancelled due to the exploding in Covid-19 cases across the country.

Animal Crossing, for better or for worse, dropped at the most perfect time.

I began my town around 10am on the 20th. Long after waking up and tending to errands and other household chores as soon as I could in order to have no intteruptions the rest of the day, I put close to ten hours in on day one and would, eventually as of yesterday, go on to put over 2000 hours in total.

Yesterday I recorded a town tour, which is likely to be the final layout of the town barring any further (unlikely) updates for the game, content-wise.

Happy birthday, Animal Crossing! Thank you for the memories.