It was nothing too special, really… My first exposure was from seeing my siblings play Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The Wild World theme song there has been nostalgic to me… I also liked to look at the trophies they collected, which included a few AC characters.
Come the age of the 3DS. By 2018 (late, I know) I've had mine for almost a year. On Christmas I got New Leaf, my first AC game. It was fun and relaxing and it clicked with me and now I really like Animal Crossing! ("love" would be overstating it for me...)
I didn't really expect myself to be part of the fandom though. I can be pretty reclusive, and in the past I had a guilty pleasure of reading these wiki articles bashing stuff like video games and movies. At one point there was a wiki like this that was about fandoms and hatedoms. My memory's hazy but I'm pretty sure the Animal Crossing fandom was in there. It was in this wiki that I ended up with a bad first impression of the community and learned about some certain questionable content (which we shall refuse to speak any more of).
Thankfully, joining The Bell Tree has helped me come to realize that not everyone in the Animal Crossing fandom is toxic after all.
Still, saying I'm part of a fandom makes me feel nervous because of everything I read back then, but now I'm slowly but surely transitioning out it. Just give me, like, a few more years...
I first started loving animal when I saw someone post a town tour video of their town in New Leaf I thought it looked so cute and immediately bought the game.
It was such on release for New Leaf and I’ve been playing animal crossing ever since
A friend from my childhood had both WW and CF and would show me her town, so I really wanted to have my own. After begging my parents so much, they finally got me City Folk, and then later on New Leaf came out so I became obsessed with the franchise.
i saw the trailer for animal crossing new leaf on the internet and instantly wanted it. after playing new leaf and enjoying it a lot, i began getting into the other installments too. still love it to this day!
I was given a DS by a very distant family friend, and I got Wild World. I was quite small and I just remember getting stuck every time I tried to play because Resetti would shout at me and I didn't understand...
A couple of years later I got into it a bit more and I found out that I needed to save my game and he wouldn't bug me () so I played more often, and then ACNH came out.
I got it in August 2020, so a little while after it came out and I LOVED it. Honestly animal crossing was what got me through lockdown. My first island ended up a bit of a mess, but now I've restarted and I'm going to spend more time and put more effort in.
One day in late 2020, my older sister showed me a cool little mobile game called Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. It seemed fun. It had to be because it was made by Nintendo. So I picked it up and played it for a few months… and then dropped it. I was aware of the New Horizons hype but I didn’t really care about it because it wasn’t Mario or Sonic. Which meant that it was totally lame.
Anyway, cut to a year later, in late 2021, and I started getting back into the game. I don’t really remember why, but I was becoming more open to other video game franchises so I decided to play it. I actually really liked it and continued playing it. Since I connected my Nintendo account, I could just pick up where I left off. After a month or so, I was kind of bored of only playing this Animal Crossing game and wanted to branch out more and play other games in the series. So I decided I wanted to play New Leaf But first, I started watching a playthrough of the game made by the one and only ZackScottGames. And it just made me want to play even more. This was around November 2021, so in late March 2022, I decided to ask my parents to get the game. And it arrived just in time for spring break.
I don’t think anything will match how it felt to play the game for the first few days. It was so fun to play a new kind of game that wasn’t anything like Super Mario 3D Land or New Super Mario Bros DS or Sonic CD, or even Kirby Super Star which I’d also started playing recently. And those games were really fun when I first started them. But this game was different. You probably know what makes a life sim different than a platformer, but Pocket Camp is really different than mainline games, and that was my only exposure before I played this game. After that, it became my favorite video game series (which you probably know isn’t the case anymore), and I became obsessed with consuming Animal Crossing content, including all of the other games. While I’m not nearly as ecstatic about the series anymore, probably because I’ve played for more than two years at this point, I still have fond memories of playing for the first time.
I guess the reason I like the series so much is because it’s different and relaxing. Like, after I’m done raging because I was trying to beat Champion’s Road in Super Mario 3D World, I can play something that’s just chill, and then go back to platforming or playing an RPG, or trying to solve a puzzle to escape a dungeon.
Hmm. Another paragraph or so and this could easily qualify as an essay.
when pocket camp first came out, which still had me wanting more but i didn't own any of the games at the time.
then when nh released, i ended up getting it as an early gift for my birthday and played it for about three or four months straight; u have no idea how eager i was to play the next day to do my daily routine and slowly mold/decorate the island to my liking. ended up buying the characters i loved on ebay in order to get rid of the ones i had but didn't really like.
looking back now, it's made me wonder why i had thought the original game was boring as a kid (without even having played it in the first place!), which in turn makes me wish i could go back in time just to try it and then go on to play the later titles had i ended up loving it as much as i loved (or even more than that!) nh.
hope to be more active in the community because my hyperfixation is starting to come back and i'm very excited to get back into ac! <:
In the Spring of 2017, I had completed my first semester at my new college. It wasn't my first college semester, but it was my first at a "proper" college. To reward myself, I thought I would treat myself to a new game on the 3DS. I talked to a good friend of mine, who insisted I get "Animal Crossing: New Leaf"
One day after the semester ended, I went to my local GameStop and purchased a copy of New Leaf. I was hooked from then on, and went on to play some of Pocket Camp, New Horizons, and more recently, Wild World. I still think New Leaf is the best game in the Animal Crossing series.
I’ve shared the story I thought was real in the past, but I think I misremembered. In reality I think Wild World was my first. I most likely rented it from GameFly back when I had a subscription to that service in 2010-2011 and played a little bit of it on my DS lite. The memory came back to me when I started a save file of Wild World recently and a very fuzzy memory came back. The title screen and intro were just too familiar. I didn’t last long on the game though since I didn’t know what to do and returned it.
Then I rented New Leaf in 2014 and really enjoyed it. I was bummed to have to return it and waited until my birthday in 2015 to get my own copy. I’ve always been bad at keeping a habit to log on that game regularly, but I still return to it sometimes now.
technically my first exposure was to the animal crossing nintendo land mini game but i have no idea how that correlates to the series’ general gameplay.
i think i’ve mentioned this before in another thread but i was 9 years old and saw reggie’s new leaf house tour video on the nintendo eshop.
i always loved customizing my characters/whatever i could in games but when i saw that video of new leaf, i was so amazed that you could have your own life and your own house and customize it to that extent in a game.
two weeks later, i begged my mom to take me to take me to gamestop, i only had $20 but luckily she lent me another $10 (back when games were $30) and now its been almost 10 years since i’ve started playing.
How did you FIRST discover Animal Crossing?
I knew about it for a while before I started playing, just never really thought too hard about it. I remember my friend who used to work at Nintendo got to play test NL's English version and they also got the poptart DS in advance I thought it was cute and similar to Rune Factory that's about it Did you like it at first?
My sister eventually bought us both a copy so we could play together, and I was nigh instantly hooked! I especially loved all the care that went into the sound design and I loved catching the bugs and reading what Blathers had to say about them What was your FIRST AC game you ever played?
New Leaf What was it about the game, that solidified your dedication to the fandom?
I think just the massive catalog of items is what really hooked me. In NL I made it my goal to decorate my house with what I considered the rarest items, like full sets of items from holidays, Gracie furniture, and all the DLC I could get my hands on. How did you know this fandom would be in your life forever?
Basically in 2020 when I started participating in the community and the events here on TBT. This place has been so good for me, I feel like a better person for joining, and I'm glad to be able to share my love of this silly little game with you all!
I discovered the series around mid 2016 when I stumbled across PeanutButterGamer's review of the first game, I didn't really pay much attention to the series afterward but around very early pre-pandemic 2020 my older brother had gotten himself a copy of New Leaf and would not stop talking about it, I eventually decided to see what the hype from him was about and I got myself my own copy of New Leaf around early March of that year. I immediately fell in love with it and then got New Horizons shortly after and all the other games as well over the course of a year and a half.
How did you FIRST discover Animal Crossing? Did you like it at first?
I was at Walmart with my family, and my parents said I could pick out a game. I saw a game called Animal Crossing, and I thought it looked really cute, so I decided it was the game I wanted. And it was a good choice because I loved it instantly. My brother also played as well, and I don't know if he loved it as much as I did, but I do think he enjoyed it.
What was your FIRST AC game you ever played?
It's the one I was talking about above, which was Animal Crossing for the GameCube.
What was it about the game, that solidified your dedication to the fandom? How did you know this fandom would be in your life forever?
Well, since I loved the first game, I of course had to get Wild World once I got a DS. And I enjoyed that one a lot as well, so at that point I probably knew it was a series I was going to continue to enjoy. After that I played all the other games in the series as they were released, and each game just solidified my love for the series even more!
It all started with a TV advert for animal crossing wild world. It just looked so cozy and peaceful and I loved the animal crossing music in it! I didn’t have a da yet at the time but really really wanted to play this game. My friends had it too and I loved watching them play it. Eventually I got my own ds and animal crossing and we loved visiting each other’s towns, helping with weeding, collecting shells etc :3
It was coming up to Christmas 2008. I wanted to buy a wii console so started looking at games (i was never a gamer but thought this looked fun and something I could play with my son who was 5 )
I bought a dance game and wii fit for me and then I saw a cute looking animal game called city folk that I thought Alex would like. We started playing together and sounds silly but it brought us close and through the years has kept us close. We have played every AC game together and it is lovely to have that special connection.
How did you FIRST discover Animal Crossing? Did you like it at first?
My parents bought a copy of the OG Animal Crossing on the GameCube. I really enjoyed it a lot! What was your FIRST AC game you ever played?
Animal Crossing (GC)
What was it about the game, that solidified your dedication to the fandom? How did you know this fandom would be in your life forever?
I'm not really sure. I think I liked it because it was simple and calming. For as how did I know? When I kept coming back to each new game to play more and more.
I can’t quite call myself a day one fan, but I’d say I came pretty close to it for the way the world was at the time! My parents got my sister and I a gamecube for Christmas in either 2002 or 2003, can’t remember exactly. I would have been in kindergarten or first grade. They also got a couple games for us to go with it, and did not at all realize the amount of reading that would be involved I was still working on reading more than a couple sentences at a time, and my sister was even younger and not reading much at all yet. But I was immediately sucked into the game, even if my dad had to help me understand what was going on most of the time. This interest actually wound up being what made me push through and become significantly more proficient at reading, just from wanting to understand what was happening in the game by myself. By the time I was in second grade I did a school project where I declared that I was an “expert” on Animal Crossing (even if some of that expert knowledge was stuff my dad found online and told me about ). From there I’ve just always loved it, even if I end up having moments where I’m not playing much. I’ve had every main game available in the US. How much I actually play ebbs and flows a little but it’s always sort of just something floating somewhere in my mind, which makes sense given that it’s been with me for over 20 years, the vast majority of my life.
I had already had a GameCube for a while and was looking for a new game to play. My parents took me to the video rental store to pick out something to watch, but instead I went over to the games and browsed them. I saw the cover for Animal Crossing, and it looked like something I'd enjoy, so I asked to rent a game instead. I was hooked, and immediately bought it with my allowance money. I played it every day for a good portion of my summer break, so it's pretty memorable to me.
) so I played more often, and then ACNH came out.
) 
I was still working on reading more than a couple sentences at a time, and my sister was even younger and not reading much at all yet. But I was immediately sucked into the game, even if my dad had to help me understand what was going on most of the time. This interest actually wound up being what made me push through and become significantly more proficient at reading, just from wanting to understand what was happening in the game by myself. By the time I was in second grade I did a school project where I declared that I was an “expert” on Animal Crossing (even if some of that expert knowledge was stuff my dad found online and told me about 
