Nintendo’s original Animal Crossing on GameCube helped pave the way for many of the cozy games players have today. The cute animal villagers largely enjoy a blissful experience, but a new AI hack has the town feeling that Tom Nook–the raccoon who basically controls the local economy based on bells as currency–is a tyrant who needs to go down.
Software engineer Josh Fonseca created this Animal Crossing hack (via Ars Technica), and he explained at length how he pulled it off in the accompanying YouTube video. The GameCube software wasn’t really designed to hacked like this, but Fonseca was eventually able to find his way in and give Animal Crossing some commands that could be understood by the game’s code.
Fonseca initially tried to use a single live language model AI to write new dialogue for the characters, while also drawing their character traits from online wikis. According to Fonseca, that approach failed because he was asking the AI to do too much. In the end, he set aside one AI program to handle the dialogue, while another program essentially directed its in-game presentation.
Once this was done, Fonseca introduced some modern elements to the game including news about current events. He also cheekily instructed the AI to depict resentment towards Tom Nook, which grows into unrest among the villagers over time. There’s no endgame conclusion where the villagers confront Tom, but it is a very funny turn for these gentle creatures.
Former Nintendo of America localization manager Leslie Swan recently shared that Animal Crossing almost had another name that was ultimately rejected. The most recent game in the franchise, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, was released in 2020. That game received a Switch 2 update earlier this year. Although there aren’t any new titles in the franchise at the moment, there are Animal Crossing Crocs that are available for order.