“The“The serendipity of the time [Animal Crossing: New Horizons] came out is ridiculous,” says Lex Roberts, curator of the UK National Videogame Museum’s Animal Crossing Diaries. The project aims to capture “the cultural phenomenon that followed the release of Animal Crossing … in March 2020, just as the world was transformed by the pandemic.”
New Horizons has been inextricably associated with COVID-19, with early reviews making mention of how much we all needed an escape as lockdowns and quarantines suddenly became our lives. As it became apparent that social distancing would be around for a long time, the game became the location of weddings, memorials, protests, and political campaigning, to name just a few.
But it’s not possible to experience the same New Horizons as the one everyone was playing in the spring of 2020. “You can’t play the game and understand how people used it and what the experience of playing it in the [early days of the] pandemic was,” says Roberts.
Kelsey Lewin, co-director of the Video Game History Foundation, notes that the social experience has changed as people have moved on. “[Early on], a co-worker from six years ago just kind of randomly wandered into my town, because everyone was playing and my gates were open,” she says. “If you were to just randomly show up unannounced to someone’s island [now], it’s not going to be taken in the same way.”