passwords and memory cards

written 20210705, updated 20240520.

two things in animal crossing, its secret code system and the fact of its being stored on a physical memory card. a port of a nintendo 64 game with no online capaility, the original animal crossing had to rely on clever workarounds to let players communicate with one another, and even then, the process was clunky. it was also kind of more fun for that reason.

start with the secret code system, which is roughly analogous to later games’ mail systems. the aim of this was to let players send items from one town to another, despite the game not actually being constructed in such a way as to allow for things to be sent.

if you wanted to send an item to your friend, here is how it worked. you would meander over to tom nook’s store, item in hand, and ask to send something to a different town. you wrote in your friend’s name, wrote their town, and chose your item. tom nook would take your item, and then give you a thirty-digit code you would have to write down, and then figure out how to get it to your friend outside of the game.

code in hand, your friend would meander over to the tom nook of their town, and read it back to him, remembering this was using the gamecube controller too, and if they were the right recipient, and if they were in the right town, tom nook would hand the item across.

(if your friend wasn’t the recipient, say, because you spelt their town name wrong, then the item was lost in transit forever.)

what a terrible system. all the same there’s something gained in the logistical effort it takes to send an item in this game. if feels reminiscent of the real effort it takes to send mail in real life, and perhaps, of how special it feels to receive mail as a result. the mailing systems in later versions is much more streamlined. select an item, pick a name from a drop down list and it’s away.

in contrast, by placing the onus on you, the player, to sort out the logistics of getting your item from a to b, the game brings an almost material sense of something being transited, a gift crystallised in a cipher, which is think is such an interesting, paratextual thing for a game to do, even if the whole reason it’s doing this is to work around its own outdated programming.

here’s a good point to talk about the next thing. visiting someone’s town. mailing an item requires you to do the busywork of encoding it and transmitting it, by handwritten note, irc missive or forum post. visiting another town, or having someone visit your town, goes a step further in requires you and/or your memory card to actually go physically travelling.

the original n64 version of animal crossing was stored directly on the game cartridges and so i suppose, would not have had the “visit town” feature. but the gamecube versions saved the entire village to a memory card, taking up a full 59 blocks of space. it shipped with a memory card for this reason.

so having got access to someone else’s entire little world recorded into the memory card, if you wanted to go-a-visiting, you would plug it into slot b, your own card in slot a. this let you take the train across to explore an unfamiliar town at your leisure, your friend curiously absent from the town during your visit.

i recall you could leave your mark on the town, to an extent. you could chop down trees, buy out tom nook, shake down some exotic fruit, and get bullied by the villagers. you could, in short, have an adventure in your friend’s village and return home at the end, pockets full of their fruit and furniture, their villagers commenting on the strange visitor forevermore.

i find the physicality of storing your game in a cartridge and taking it around with you to be really appealling, too. it’s like a more complicated polly pocket. it’s like keeping a universe in a bottle, and peeping in at select moments to see what’s going on.

whereas the item code system requires you to transpose information out of the game, convey it, and then see it recoded, the save file system instantiates the game world in a compact, grey brick for you to transport around and plug into things. the exist because of the technical limitations, they are clunky workarounds, but they produce their own kinds of satisfation.

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