© Alan LopezSoapbox’s features allow our individual writers to express their own opinions on important topics, opinions that may not necessarily be the voice of the website. Today, Alan takes out his meter display and calculates how much money he wasted invested wisely in Bank of Nook last year.
In the corner of my table, there is a small plastic trinket always near my stack of business cards, next to a basin crammed with discarded pens: it is a tiny little house, perhaps two inches high, with tiny windows and a tiny door. . When you open that little door, a red otter called “Pascal” slides out. I pull it whenever I’m sad. I love it, it’s cute.
Pascal and the house he lives in come from the phenomenon of city building, Animal Crossing. You may have heard of it. Imported from Japan, its little plastic house has been on my table for almost a decade. It was the only Animal Crossing thing I had for years.
That was my picturesque life, before March 20, 2020, the day I bought it Animal Crossing: New Horizons for my Nintendo Switch for $ 59.99.
You know what happened next: the world has succumbed to a global pandemic; we all huddle together inside the house; we cling to our fictional animal friends in search of comfort. It is somewhat painful to realize that a full year has passed since my obsession with Animal Crossing began.
And no, I don’t mean that I became obsessed with the game itself. Honestly, I mostly like to see others play. I don’t worry too much about the small details of the gameplay. My villager’s hair used to mess up his head, a sign of rare logins. Instead, the silver lining for my lost year was the opportunity to release some repressed fandom for something that I didn’t even know I cared about so much.
My Year of Animal Crossing
© Nintendo LifeIt all started with business cards. Why do you always start with business cards?
A slight review: I did in fact, buy something else from Animal Crossing, besides that plastic chachki. Until recently, practically the only modern product for the series that Nintendo has ever launched in the state were four series of amiibo cards, each featuring a different animal from the game’s history.
The timing of its release (2015) was certainly wrong. Despite having small chips inside that allow you to scan them in games, they certainly didn’t do much at that time. Piles of these things were literally spreading down the halls not long after their launch. My local stores could hardly distribute them, reducing their prices to cents on the dollar. So, yes, of course, I relented. I ended up buying packages with enough discounts that I almost completed the entire collection before I even gave up on them.
But when Nintendo announced five whole years later that these random cards were literally the only way to invite animals to their game, these discarded pieces of paper instantly became eBay gold; So much so that people who were out of my life for years were sending me cold messages asking for random animals. Despite all my useless pastimes, I had become a god among mortals … except for the fact that I was still losing fifteen or twenty cards.
© Alan LopezI’m not exactly proud of that, but I spent the first few weeks of my quarantine exchanging duplicate letters in the mail on Reddit. But eventually, even trade became too expensive. (“Do you want HOW MANY letters to Pietro ?!” it was a real thing I told someone.) After researching trusted sellers online, I bought:
- POMPOM # 373 – $ 2.95
- ANCHOVY # 219 – $ 1.55
- PIETRO # 356 – $ 35
But then, another problem: I bought official binders for the first three series very cheap, returning to the launch, but I never found the Binder of Series 4. No problem, I found it on eBay for a not exactly cheap $ 51, after shipping. I was so close to finishing the set, so why not?
This entire excursion ended up leaving me needing only four cards, unfortunately some of the most popular animals that I was not lucky enough to get randomly in packages years ago. For the privilege of stealing Rosie, Lucky, Wendell and Ribbot, I haggled an online seller for a mere $ 86.10. My Animal Crossing collection was finally complete …
Nook, Inc.
Except not, it wasn’t, actually. Because then came an official “companion book” from Animal Crossing, an encyclopedia of minutiae of the game that today is being resold at exorbitant prices well north of $ 100, but that I managed to pre-order at launch. I just paid $ 24.40, an absolute theft! (I also put a pack of Animal Crossing stickers in my cart, but it was just $ 5)
As Animal Crossing grew in ubiquity during quarantined life, that’s when secondhand art became huge online. My friend made an art print that she sold to a charity, so I paid $ 20 for that. Sometime later in the year, a whole series of ridiculously cute pins appeared on my Twitter feed and, amid all the fanfare of a low stock alert, I decided to buy each one still available. This totaled $ 110.50. (Hey, it’s important to support small businesses during a pandemic!)
I was not quick enough to catch them all, Although. Don’t worry, I picked up the ones that were missing a few months later, during a refueling to $ 43.
And then came the pile of all Animal Crossing souvenirs, at least in terms of price: designer clothes. After a presumably successful run of other clothing from the Nintendo franchise, the modern Australian outlet BlackMilk entered the Animal Crossing movement with a stunning line of clothing.
It had been my lifelong dream – or so I decided right when my phone finished loading the newsletter I had signed up for – to see my partner in a Timmy and Tommy dress. Two of them, actually. She would also look great in a neon blue T-shirt with a tie on the front, I bet.
It’s true that I knew what I was getting into when I paid $ 197 for all these things. And the other Animal Crossing outfit I bought a day later to $ 114.32? That was a gift.
It is your detailed invoice! Yes Yes.
© Nintendo LifeYou can read all of this and think that I’m just a rich guy. I mean, I have a job. But no, I’m not. I’m usually pretty good with money, actually. Except, maybe, for a month or two ago, when Nintendo finally relaunched the collectible Animal Crossing cards – the ones that put me in this mess in the first place – and made them available online for (and correct me if I’m wrong, people fanatics in the comments) only a few hours at most. I bought nine packs for $ 45.75 just for to have they, closed.
I certainly played Animal Crossing a lot, but most of all, I played alone.
This is a cautionary tale about what happens when one of your favorite things hits a cultural vein – in this case, against all odds, a digital meditation on not life, but on life, expressed through anthropomorphic animals. The moment I picked up some Animal Crossing Makeup for $ 24, I reached New Horizons’s one-year anniversary with a $ 820.56 tab. This is money expressed in real currency, not in bells.
Animal Crossing’s good word goes beyond all the crap above; since the New Horizons craze, where before there was almost nothing, now there is everything: cuddly toys, office supplies, stickers, calendars, t-shirts, patches, etc. I literally got an email trying to sell me Animal Crossing socks while writing this article. Delivering to the level that marketers advocate can only be described as living a total “Animal Crossing lifestyle”, involving you in a lifestyle about fun lifestyles – the last of our fandoms – all exploding in a single year. . (Thank goodness I didn’t bet on the Switch with the Animal Crossing theme for $ 299.99. Can you imagine?)
And yet, of all the Animal Crossing things I own, my favorite thing remains my little Pascal, sitting in the corner of my table. I still open the door and let him out every now and then. In fact, I took it out while it was totaling the cost of every video game thing I bought last year – just Animal Crossing stuff. I will definitely not admit to you how much I spent on other video game stuff.
I’m not crazy.
© Alan Lopez