Iwata wanted everyone at Nintendo to play Animal Crossing: New Leaf before launch to understand value

Former Nintendo PR manager Ashely Day has appeared on the Back Page Podcast to talk about his time at Nintendo. One of the thing he brought up was the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata wish for all Nintendo employees to play Animal Crossing: New Leaf before the game’s release to fully understand its unique appeal. He said that Mr. Iwata was right in doing so as it really helped the teams marketing push which helped translate to the game becoming an incredible success for the company.

“There was a very unusual push behind-the-scenes to make this a success,” Day revealed. “This came from the top. This came from Iwata. Certainly in Europe, I don’t know what it was like in the States or in 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.”

“Iwata made a point and said, ‘I want everyone, it’s now your job to play New Leaf, like play it every day’… he wanted people to understand at Nintendo what it was like to play Animal Crossing habitually.

“He was right,” Day said. “It was amazing to see, like, some of the older generation of sales people who were in their late 50s and didn’t really touch games all 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.”