Opinion: Animal Crossing was always a mobile game waiting to happen

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is almost with us - in fact, it's out now in Australia, and pretty much the entire PG team has been playing it.

We've actually known Animal Crossing has been coming to mobile for more than a year now. What's more, we predicted early on that it would be the ideal fit for mobile.

It's early days yet, but our prediction seems right on the money.

This is no supreme act of clairvoyance either. In fact, I'd argue that Animal Crossing was always a mobile game waiting to happen.

If you're finding the very notion that a beloved Nintendo IP is perfectly in sync with the mobile scene blasphemous, consider this game description:

A highly casual, social community management simulation that's very light on traditional gameplay mechanics and with no real end-game. The aim is to build up a mini kingdom of sorts, ploughing currency into crafting new items.

There's a temporal element to the game, with time of day and seasons affecting the nature of the content that can be accessed. Players can also interact with fellow players, trading items and visiting their kingdoms for inspiration.

Sounds a lot like what you might call a typical mobile game from any time over the past several years, doesn't it? Needless to say, I've just described the main Animal Crossing games, which have landed on various Nintendo consoles over the past 16 years.

I'd even go as far as to say that in many respects, Animal Crossing has been hampered by its reliance on Nintendo hardware. That's enough to get you lynched in some quarters, but hear me out.

Nintendo has always sucked at online, and has only really begun to get a faltering grip on social relatively recently. Its console-based internet and community services have always been a pain to access right up to today with the Switch.

This directly impacted the early Animal Crossing games, which failed to reach their full social potential. Online elements were belatedly introduced to the series, but were pretty fiddly.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS - the latest of four mainline AC games - benefitted from StreetPass, but this was only truly effective in densely packed urban areas where the 3DS was a hit. So not many areas, then.

It remains to be seen how extensive Animal Crossing Pocket Camp's online provisions are, and how many players get involved. But with iOS and Android as the host platforms it has potentially hundreds of millions of permanently connected devices to lean upon.

No Nintendo console has ever been able to claim such a thing.

We all had a mobile version of Animal Crossing clocked from the beginning, and there's a brutally simple reason for that: Nintendo essentially made a mobile game without even realising it.

Of course, it could be argued that Nintendo's own work with Animal Crossing influenced the direction of a certain kind of mobile development. It wouldn't be the first time - just look at the number of mobile games that owe a huge debt to Mario or Zelda.

Sure enough, the App Store received its very own direct Animal Crossing 'tribute' back in 2014 in the shape of Castaway Paradise. Tellingly, by sticking closely to Nintendo's original script, it turned out to be a really good mobile game.

How we got to Animal Crossing Pocket Camp doesn't really matter. We're just glad that Nintendo has belatedly realised what it had on its hands, did the decent thing, and brought the franchise to a suitable new home.

Not that we're not slathering over the prospect of a full-fat Animal Crossing for the Nintendo Switch, of course...