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Animal Crossing

For the uninitiated, Animal Crossing is a Nintendo GameCube game of the Communication Adventure genre. どうぶつの森 (Doubutsu no Mori) translates to “Animal Forest” and is the hiragana form of 動物. As everyone who reviews this game notes, the first thing you begin to accomplish is to payoff your house. Furthermore the game plays out in real-world-time, following our same days, weeks and years, up to 29 years according to Nintendo. You have neighbors who recognize lack of activity or your progress, etc. If multiple players are playing Animal Crossing on the same GameCube, in addition to receiving mail from NPCs, they can also send you mail. The more you understand about Animal Crossing the more the following story will pull at your heart strings.

An Animal Crossing Story, 동물의 숲

An Animal Crossing Story is about how a video game can give perspective on the love of a parent across life and death. A boy buys Animal Crossing which he an his brother play together. They invite their Polio crippled mother to start playing with them. She continues to play the game long after they quit but stops as her health worsens and eventually passes away. The boy picks up Animal Crossing a year after she passes away and finds all the in game characters naturally miss his mother’s character. He checks in-game mail and opens a multitude of letters sent by his mother (still in game) sending her love to his character. A touching tale.

Forensics

I first saw this tale on a gametrailers video, embedded above. However the original story was posted December 14, 2005 on LoLieL the Black Onion Brigade. The translation on the Korean site seems unusually natural and reportedly the source is the IGN forums. I used google translator to view the Korean sourced sites and they reference the story as North American (동물의 숲과 한 북미 유저의 이야기). However I searched the 169 million posts at boards.ign.com using a couple search engines and found nothing. There is a decent translation of the story to Japanese by gameneta. Apparently the original Korean comic created from this story was created December 17, 2005 by OneSound on ThisIsGame.com.

Almost 2 years later the story explodes onto the English internet on November 19th, 2007 with posts on all the major gamer news sites, but my best leads all started with this post by Krunk4ever. This illustrates the difference between the mainstream sites who simply regurgitate stories like Engaget, Kotaku and JoyStick, versus a grass roots blogger. It really is amazing how fast news moved though. This was revealed on Digg as a YTMND post and within 36 hours the original comic was chopped up and translated and posted to GameTrailers as a video.