Animal Crossing: New Horizons required more collaborations than any previous installment

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is one of Nintendo’s biggest hits in the last decade. The franchise has been steadily growing since its localized debut on the GameCube, the a number of factors came together to make New Horizons an absolutely huge success. Turns out Nintendo needed a huge amount of people to get it done as well.

Nintendo’s Ami Takai handled object design in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and they recently penned a piece for Nintendo’s recruitment site that detailed the inordinate amount of work that went into the game. Crafting this kind of experience took a lot of manpower, and Nintendo had to team up with quite a few people to get the job done.

While Takai doesn’t give specifics, they do say that finishing up Animal Crossing: New Horizons required Nintendo to collaborate with more people than was required for any previous installment. Takai’s job required them to oversee literally hundreds of objects in the game, and that alone meant teaming up with other companies was necessary. In specific, the HD nature of all these assets meant more work had to be put into them than ever before.

When you think about the amount of objects in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the immense amount of work really comes into view. The crazy thing is, that’s just one area of the game! There’s so much more that needed to happen to get that game out the door. Even with Nintendo teaming with multiple people/studios, it still boggles the mind how they got it all done.