Animal Crossing was originally a lot darker.

Chapter 2: Playtesting

I waited. But it was longer than one day, I admittedly had gotten a bit worried that Nick forgot. He wasn't answering my texts, and I was getting anxious. That was until, about a week after he had purchased the box, he called me. I had a lot of questions, especially as to why he hadn't been answering me but it didn't take him too long to explain. He said that the day after we had talked, he went around to try and find a console to play the game with as we had discussed. But he didn't have much luck. The second day he decided to go back to the store he had bought the box from. They did actually have a Nintendo 64 in stock, it was a generic gray one, which while it didn't look like it was in the best condition would be good enough to try out the weird cartridge he had found. But more importantly, Nick mentioned a weird encounter he had while purchasing the console. The cashier recognized him and immediately began telling Nick that, after he had purchased the box, the owner of the store got really angry especially after learning about the box being solid. Well, the cashier essentially pleaded with Nick to bring the box back and he'd get a refund. They didn't know why the owner was so mad but they didn't really want to lose their job over an old box either.

Nick felt bad, clearly he had bought something that meant a lot to the owner for whatever reason but, he also wanted to find out what was on that cartridge. So, he agreed to return the box, and that's exactly what he did. With one exception, he kept the cartridge and a controller. After he took the box back to the store, the cashier seemed relieved and did refund the ¥500. In the end, Nick told me that despite losing the box he had the console, the game, and a controller to play it with, so we were finally able to play whatever was on the cartridge. While I was still frustrated that he had kept me in the dark about all of this as it was going on, I nevertheless was excited that we would finally be able to see what was on the cartridge. It could've been nothing, or it could've been that diamond in the rough we were hoping for. We were one button away from finding out. Since neither of us had anything going on for the rest of the day we decided we could at least start the game, and we did. Nick plugged up the console, and after some troubleshooting with the wires we got it working. He put the carriage in, and booted the console up.

Throughout this whole exchange he had kept me on a video-call, but he just faced the phone towards the TV screen so that I could see what was going on. While the screen stayed black for a bit, white text eventually appeared in the center. It was the number '64' spelled out in japanese, Nick and I assuming that it was a placeholder for the actual N64 logo. After that, to our surprise, music started to play. While at first we were just excited that the game wasn't going to just be silent, our excitement only amplified when I noticed something. It sounded a lot like a more simplified version of the original Animal Forest menu music. I only knew this because I had been playing that game prior to Nick finding the box. This gave me hope that maybe we were dealing with a development cartridge for an official Nintendo game, and not just any game, but the original Animal Crossing also known as Animal Forest. Instead of the usual 3D background with the character walking around though, the screen remained black and the title was just plain white text, the same as the label on the cartridge, 'Forest Game'.

The prompt under the title asked for the player to press 'Start' to start the game. There wasn't much else on the screen, just a copyright notice in the bottom left corner, which accredited the game to nintendo, and another small piece of text on the right side which read, "DEVELOPMENT BUILD, DO NOT REDISTRIBUTE", once more in japanese. Nick and I were still excited, me more so than Nick because this was really shaping up to be something unique, little did I know then just how unique of an experience it would be. After pressing start we were met with another simple screen, no K.K. Slider in sight. The screen asked us to input a name, and whatever the current time was. Unlike in the retail Animal Forest game where these choices were integrated into dialogue with Rover, it all seemed really bland in this version but we had expected that. Either way, Nick put in his real name, and set the time to his current time. We were in different time zones, very different in fact, but in the end it didn't really matter to me what he put in, I was just ready to see what the game looked like.