Late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata laughed at the prospect of localising the original Animal Crossing, as he believed the game was so specific to Japan it would be too difficult.
In an interview with Time Extension, former Nintendo localisation manager Leslie Swan discussed some of the challenges of the job, citing the original Animal Crossing – first released in Japan on N64 as Animal Forest, before a localised version was released in America on the GameCube – as a particularly tricky project.
Nintendo’s Takashi Tezuka, who worked as a producer on Animal Crossing, asked Swan to localise the game. She agreed, despite not playing the game herself in advance as she usually would. “But then he said, ‘No, Leslie, I’m not sure you understand, it’s going to be difficult’,” she said. “And I kept having to assure him that we would make it happen.”
She continued: “Then like a month or two later, I was in a meeting with Mr. Iwata and some other heads of the development group, and we were just kind of going around saying, ‘Here’s what we’re going to be working on’, and I just said, ‘Well, Mr. Tezuka is asking us to work on Animal Forest’ and he just burst out in laughter. He just laughed and said, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to do this.’ And it’s true, just everything in that game was so specific to Japan.”