Katsuya Eguchi, director of the Animal Crossing series, gave a lecture entitled "Is That a Franchise in Your Pocket?" today at the Game Developers Conference. One of the topics Eguchi spoke on was how the company has taken the home console version and adapted it to the mobile market and further, the challenges of again preparing the game for Nintendo next-generation home console codenamed Revolution.
"Much like the conversion from the console Animal Crossing onto DS, we are now exploring how to bring what we have developed in Wild World onto Revolution," he told the audience. "This time it is about bringing the world we've set up on DS over to the console world of the Revolution."
Expect more Animal Crossing Revolution details at the E3 Expo in May. Animal Crossing originated on the Nintendo 64DD hardware expansion under the intent of taking advantage of its expanded memory. The game was originally being developed for the 64DD by Takashi Tezuka and his select team. However, as a result of the 64DD's extended delays, the game was released on the Nintendo 64 as a standalone cartridge. In 2001, the Japan only Nintendo 64 edition of Animal Forest became a hit thanks to its light-hearted and family oriented atmosphere.
By 2002, Nintendo decided to port the game over to the Nintendo GameCube. While Japan got a slightly improved Animal Forest +, America got the more meaty Animal Crossing the following year.
The scale of translating the initial Japanese version of Animal Crossing to English was immense. It took six months total. In an interview with N-Sider, the translators reflected back on all the work that went into the project. They had to translate thousands of lines of text, create new holidays, new items, and more -- which ultimately made Animal Crossing Nintendo of America's largest translation project to date.
Nintendo Japan was so impressed with the translation (new holidays, new furniture, etc.) of Animal Crossing by Nintendo of America's Treehouse division that they decided to translate NOA's version of the game back into Japanese and release it as Doubutsu no Mori e-Plus. The game sold exceptionally well for a second release.
The most recent iteration in the franchise came out in 2005 for the Nintendo DS. Titled Animal Crossing: Wild World, the game for the first time allowed players to go online via Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection service. The title has been an immense hit in Japan, having already sold over 2 million copies since its release. With the growing popularity of the series, it'll be interesting to see how quickly Nintendo releases the Revolution version.