The late and legendary Nintendo president Satoru Iwata had an unusual request for European employees leading up to the launch of 2013’s Animal Crossing: New Leaf, according to a former Nintendo UK staffer.
On the latest episode of The Back Page podcast (via FRVR and GamesRadar+), former PR manager Ashley Day revealed how “there was a very unusual push behind the scenes” to help make the 3DS life sim a success.
“This came down from the top. It came down from Iwata. Certainly in Europe, I don’t know what it was like in the States or Japan, but every single employee at Nintendo Europe and all of its subsidiaries was given a free copy of New Leaf months before the game came out,” Day said.
He explained that, while employees generally received free games as they launched, this time was unusual because they were rarely issued copies prior to a game’s release.
“Iwata made a point and said, ‘I want everyone, it is now your job to play New Leaf, like play it every day.’ And that’s because he wanted people to understand at Nintendo what it was like when you play Animal Crossing habitually,” Day explained.
“He was right. It was amazing to see, like, some of the older generation of salespeople, who were in their late 50s and didn’t really touch games that much, suddenly became ultra obsessed with Animal Crossing and they were trading on the Animal Crossing stock market and making clothes.”
“To see normal people in suits talking about Animal Crossing on a daily basis was like this weird thing that proved how special it was. And it translated into the marketing and the sales and the game was, in fact, a huge success in part because of that innovative internal push.”
As Day mentioned, New Leaf was indeed a huge success for Nintendo, quickly becoming the best-selling game in the Animal Crossing series at the time until it was surpassed by 2020’s New Horizons.
Satoru Iwata passed away in 2015. He helped Nintendo achieve massive financial success with the launch of the DS and Wii systems, and was beloved by many fans who considered him the public face of the company.
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Written by Reece Heather
A veteran Zelda Universe editor and First-class journalism graduate, Reece emerged with a Nintendo 64 and a lifelong obsession after a narrow escape from Santa’s Naughty List in 1998. Outside of games, he’s reading Punisher comics, being bossed around by his cocker spaniel, and cornering innocent bystanders to rant about the importance of game preservation.
