In an exclusive interview with Time Extension, which went live yesterday, Leslie Swan, a former localization director at Nintendo and one of the individuals responsible for bringing Animal Crossing to the West, shared some fascinating insight into the arduous process behind naming the classic lifestyle sim.
As you may already be aware, Animal Crossing isn't the series's original Japanese name, with the games instead going by Dōbutsu no Mori in Japan, which literally translates to "Animal Forest".
This explains why early coverage of the game in magazines like Nintendo Power ended up referring to the title as Animal Forest, with Nintendo simply assuming it would be able to use the name in the West, following the localization process.
As Swan detailed in our interview, this unfortunately wasn't to be, with the former Nintendo employee telling us that the name ended up rejected by legal at Nintendo, after checking whether there were any similar trademarks that might cause potential issues with merchandising the game further down the line.
"We really wanted to maintain "Animal" in the name," Swan told us. "And we did try to keep "Forest" in the name too, but legal told us, 'No, that's not going to happen.' Sometimes I would just go to them and say, 'Okay, I want you to walk me through why this failed or why this failed, so we don't waste any more time going this direction or that direction.' And that was just so that I understood why something wasn't working so we could move in a different direction. But yeah, the naming of products was a really challenging part of the job. Animal Crossing was probably the most difficult."
According to Swan, it was likely between six months to a year before the team came up with Animal Crossing, a reference to the train station in the original set of towns, with the localization team within Nintendo going through countless ideas to replace it.
"It must have been at least six months or maybe a year for us to clear the name Animal Crossing," said Swan. "I remember we had so many other names that we were in love with and then we would be crushed when they would be rejected. My favourite was 'Animal Acres', because the grids of the town lent themselves to being called acres. But again, that didn't clear."
We asked Swan if she could remember any more names, but sadly she told us that she had probably "pushed them all out of mind" and that they did "hundreds". As for the winning name, we did want to see whether Swan would share who came up with the finished title, but given the time that has passed and the manner in which the name was created she was reluctant to give credit to any one individual, in a section of the interview we cut for length.
"I can't imagine the game by any other name now, but at the time it was... I mean, we liked it," said Swan. "As for who came up with the name, I'm always very careful about giving any one person credit for this or that, because when you're sitting in a brainstorming session, everything somebody throws out, the next person builds on it.
"So whatever it ends up with, even though one person might have come up with that, that built on everything else and the other ideas that people had. So I try to never say that, other than in rare instances where it's really clear like Tim O'Leary coming up with the name Mr. Resetti. Tim O 'Leary was one of the translators who worked on that game. He came up with the name for Mr. Resetti (who is called "Risetto-san" in Japan) and I remember we were all just laughing our heads off at that one."
What do you think? Do you think "Animal Acres" would be a good stand in for the Animal Crossing name? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!