Joshua J. Slone (4666) on 6/26/2007 6:17 PM · Permalink · Report

I previous submitted a media scan and some trivia about this, but now that we have these game boards there's a good place to give some further detail.

Here's the trivia, which gives the gist:
In early August 2002 Nintendo ran a contest where teams of two told in 50 words or less why they should get free copies of the game. 125 teams of these so-called Animal Crossing Pioneers got copies a month earlier than the general release. This helped to create a big buzz about the game on the Internet, and is also where the "Promotional Copy" disc scan on this site came from.

I was on one of those winning teams. I paired up with an online buddy, Alex Fraioli. Our plan to make the most of the low word limit was to do so in the form of haiku. Following is our entry:

Haiku

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Josh:

Twenty-four seven
Three six five (or six) per year
Animal Crossing

If can't Pioneer,
Mario would stay in Cube;
Legs would atrophy!

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Alex:

Night and Day system
It sounds promising to me
Acting as if real

And when connected
To my small Game Boy Advance
Possibilities! Mid-August we received news we were among the winners, and by late August we'd received the game, about three weeks before it was released to the nation at large. So for that time we basically played the game, traded with our fellow pioneers, and helped create pre-release hype for the game on places like online message boards by telling people about our experiences. The pioneer prize package also included a nifty calendar (which a pet later uhh... made a bit nasty), and an online chat with the localization team, though nothing much memorable happened at it. A cool experience, and Animal Crossing remains a favorite for me. I do have another pretty big connection to Animal Crossing, but that's for another post.