Trivia / Animal Crossing: New Horizons

• Approval of God: The developers of the game have responded very favorably with fan art pairing Doom Slayer with Isabelle.
• Bad Export for You: My Nintendo and Switch Online services are not available in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, so for those regions, this is the first Animal Crossing where it isn't possible to visit another island over the internet.
• Banned in China: Officially, the game is banned for import or domestic sale in China due to depictions of the supernatural—i.e., Wisp. This does track with the CCP's established media rules, and New Horizons was never cleared for legal distribution in the first place, but the game was selling relatively quietly on the grey market until it was discovered that players were using the custom patterns feature to spread anti-CCP and pro-Hong Kong messages.
• Defictionalization: In March 2024, the Seattle Aquarium launched an official collaboration with the game. The facility was populated with character standees and official merchandise, and they even hosted a real life version of the museum scavenger hunt (with participants receiving mini replicas of the fishing trophies).
• Dummied Out: The constantly-updating "games as a service" design of this entry means many, many fan-favorite features can be found by dataminers, several of which have later been implemented. The museum's art wing and the diving function were both found before release, and the Roost (now called the Museum Cafe) lurked unused in the code for almost two years before being implemented in late 2021.
• Fandom Nod: One of the new villagers in New Horizons is a wolf named Audie, possibly named after an elderly woman who logged 3500+ hours into New Leaf, and became an internet sensation after her grandson posted about it online. In the Japanese version, she's named Monika, meaning this nod was on the localization team's side.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Cozy Grove is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, BUT INDIE, AND MULTI-PLATFORM.
  • And then there's Hokko Life, which is developed by a Swedish indie company called Wonderscope Games and published by Team17.
• Kids' Meal Toy: In 2021, Burger King sold toys based on Super Mario Bros., Splatoon 2, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and the The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening remake. The AC:NH toy was a bead maze decorated with stock art of Tom Nook, Timmy, Tommy, Isabelle, and K.K. Slider.
• Killer App: Following in the footsteps of its predecessor, New Horizons has reached new records, with 1.88 million copies sold in Japan in the first three days, beating the fastest-selling record previously set by Pokémon Sword and Shield. As shown in the graph, it has also considerably boosted sales for Switch consoles. In less than six months, it became the best-selling video game of all time in Japan (except for Pokémon Red and Blue). It also sold more physical copies than all of its previous installments combined in the United Kingdom, and outpaced the coinciding release of Doom Eternal. In the U.S., the game lead to the Switch having its best monthly sales outside of the holidays, even topping the launch month back in March 2017. In April 2020, it became the best selling Animal Crossing with New Horizons' launch month sales beating the lifetime sales of all the previous Animal Crossing entries. The game also received a large boost due to the COVID-19 pandemic keeping people stuck at home, as it came out right before or as several major countries initiated lockdowns, leading to people across the world seeking some form of stress relief.
• Meaningful Release Date: The date of the 2.0 Update Direct (which included the grand return of Brewster) was released on October 15th; Brewster's birthday.
• Meme Acknowledgement: A few hours after the October 15, 2021 Direct, the Nintendo of America YouTube page conducted a poll on the most excited additions to the game. Among these is the memetic Froggy Chair (which actually became the most voted option).
• Newbie Boom: While the franchise was already hugely popular thanks to an earlier newbie boom spurned on by New Leaf, the positive word of mouth for New Horizons from long-time players, increased prominence of social media since 2012/2013, the increased demand for videogames during the 2020 pandemic, and popularity of the Nintendo Switch as a console attracted even more new players to the fanbase than before.
• No Export for You:
  • The Pocket Camp items are not accessible at all to those who live in areas that the game hasn't launched, and who don't have Nintendo Online accounts.
  • The version 2.0.0 update DLC, Happy Home Paradise, being a DLC as it is, will not be available to those who live in a country that have no access to the Nintendo eShop.
• Schedule Slip:
  • The game was originally slated for a late 2019 release. However, due to difficulties with getting the game to optimal quality on-time, it was delayed to March 2020.
  • Inverted for the 2.0 update - while it was announced to be released on November 5th 2021, it ended up coming out a full day earlier all of a sudden.
• Science Marches On: Similar to the Seismosaurus being renamed Diplodocus in New Leaf, the Spinosaurus fossil has been updated with shorter limbs and a different sail to be more similar to more complete skeletons described in 2014. However, the Spinosaurus fossil was again a victim of this trope when, merely a month after the game's release, a new study revealed that it had a tall, paddle-like tail with long spines, more reflective of the now-agreed-upon aquatic lifestyle it lived than the more terrestrial-looking tail depicted in-game.
• Sequel Gap: Between Animal Crossing: New Leaf (2012 in Japan, 2013 elsewhere) and Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch (2020 in all regions). Not to say that gap was devoid of Animal Crossing content—New Leaf received the Welcome amiibo update, and the spinoffs Happy Home Designer, amiibo Festival and Pocket Camp were also released—but this marks the longest wait between proper mainline games, which was previously only three to four years. It's also been twelve years since the last release on a home console. New Horizons was also subject to a delay; its release was originally planned for late 2019.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • One rumor that circulated on social media posited that if the player performed the Clap or Joy reaction at the airport until Orville blushes, either you'll be taken to a special island on your next mystery tour, or you'll just have increased odds of going to a more valuable island, like Tarantula Island or Money Rock island. Some mutations of the rumor claim that odds increase further if you're wearing DAL merch. Dataminers and regular players alike have proven both false, with dataminers who reverse-engineered the code remarking that the island is statistically chosen and then encoded into the ticket at time of redemption.
  • Also related to the above: Claims were also spread when the game first came out that the island (both the one you live in and the ones you visit on Mystery Tours) would be procedurally generated and no two islands will be the same. Data miners have also proven this false and released topology maps of all the islands encoded into the game as proof. This isn't completely wrong though- once you unlock terraforming, you can make your island unlike any other out there (at least until someone copies it by using all the photos you uploaded to social media as reference), but you still can't terraform mystery tour islands, and you can't terraform from the get go, you need to obtain a 3-star island rating to unlock Island Designer, then unlock the terraforming functionality.
  • Various rumors circulate about how to get rid of unwanted villagers, such as decreasing their friendship level by not talking to them or bullying them, surrounding their house with fencing so they can't leave, or reporting them to Isabelle. As with the Mystery Tour myths, datamining has disproven all of these. Without an amiibo on hand, there is no way to kick a villager on demand. The only other ways to make a villager leave are to wait (or time-travel) until the game rolls for said villager to ask to leave, or wait for a random campsite villager to appear and use soft-resets to re-roll who they ask to replace until they choose the unwanted villager. In fact, completely refusing to interact with an unwanted villager is counter-productive, as a villager who has not spoken their "first meeting" dialogue cannot be picked to ask to move out. The only inkling of truth in these rumours is that lower friendship substantially increases the chance that a villager will be picked by the game to ask to leave.
  • Campsite villagers will sometimes challenge the player to a card game that decides whether they will move in. There are claims that there are certain methods to reliably predict the colour/suit of the card and thus reliably win the card game. These rumours are false - the card game is one of pure chance.
  • For a time, a semi-common rule for visitors was to not talk to villagers, out of fear that outsiders talking to villagers would make that villager want to move out. This is completely false, so no need to panic if someone comes to sell turnips and decides to pay Audie a visit.
  • Claims were made that there are ways of manipulating the chances of obtaining certain villagers on Nook Mile Ticket islands, such as certain personalities being more common at certain times of day, or wearing certain clothes increasing the chances of meeting certain personalities. Another rumour was that the chances of specific villagers appearing on Mystery Islands was not even, and certain highly desirable villagers were unusually rare. Dataminers disproved the first rumour, and by doing so they partially proved the second one - the game always rolls a random species, and then a random villager of that species. Thus, the more villagers a species has, the lower the chances of finding a specific villager of that species. This means that the chance of finding the extremely popular Raymond (or any specific cat villager) is the lowest in the game, as there are 23 cat villagers, the most of any species.
  • A rare case where the rumor isn't completely wrong: when people started showing an upgraded Nook's Cranny, various rumors circulated as to how, with one of the most common theories being you have to spend X amount of bells there. One criterion is to have a combined buy/sell total of 200k bells, with another one being that Mabel has to have visited at some point. The problem is that the third criterion is that the basic Nook's Cranny has to be active for at least 30 days; if you bought the game on release day (March 20, 2020), the Nook's Cranny upgrade wouldn't be accessible until the tail end of April 2020 at the earliest. Getting it earlier requires manipulating the console clock, no matter how many bells you spend.
  • Another rumor claimed there was a weekly pattern regarding money trees. Burying bells in a glowing hole will result in a money tree which can triple your investment, but in most cases the tree will only bear 30k total, regardless of a seed larger than 10k. According to the rumor, it was possible to predict which day of the week a money tree would match a larger investment, returning as much as 297k. Once again, datamining has proven this false. Day of the week plays no role; every day has the same 30% chance of tripling an investment above 10k, but a 70% chance of only bearing 30k total.
  • Once the 1.2.0 update came out, a bunch of rumors came out about Leif deleting your save file or bricking your console if you do things like speaking to him with wrapped presents in your inventory or having more than 3 slots in the inventory filled with bush seeds. All of them were debunked quickly, but many people continue to be concerned, probably in part due to some real glitches involving empty villager homes that can't be filled (which have been fixed).
  • Since "large spike" turnip prices sometimes go unbelievably high, rumors abound about how high it can go, often with claims that it can reach 800 or more. The actual maximum is 660, and values over 600 are extremely rare; screenshots of higher numbers were achieved through glitches or hacks (or simply image editing).
  • The number of fossils that spawn on your island each day somehow became a point of contention. You always get 4 if none are still in the ground at the end of the day, but if you did miss any, there can be up to 6 buried fossils after the new day starts. This can create the illusion that more than 4 can spawn in a day, but serious attempts to test this (on a completely flat island, for example, where the fossils have nowhere to hide) have not managed to get more (or less) than 4. A poorly-worded blurb in the official guide caused further confusion, mixing up the number of fossils you can find with the number of new ones that can appear.
  • Some hackers came up with a way to make star fragments literally grow on trees; screenshots got spread around without context, leading to rumors that there's some way to plant star fragments similar to how you can plant money in the daily glowing hole. Obviously, non-hacked versions of the game don't let you do this (even less so when the “star trees” were patched out in version 1.4.1). Additional rumors claimed that ending up with one of these hacked items could corrupt your save file or (somehow) brick the entire console; there's no evidence for any of that, though this myth probably originates from debug items in earlier games that really were capable of screwing up someone's save file.

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