Animal Crossing is 20 today and Nintendo’s celebrating with a huge soundtrack set

Nintendo‘s Japan HQ has celebrated the 20th anniversary of Animal Crossing today by announcing a huge soundtrack box set.

The first Animal Crossing game, Dōbutsu no Mori (Animal Forest), was released on the Nintendo 64 in Japan on April 14, 2001. It wouldn’t come to the west until the enhanced GameCube update was released in North America on September 16, 2002.

It would take another two years for the game to come to Europe, finally releasing on September 24, 2004.

The Japan-only Animal Crossing New Horizons Soundtrack: Limited Edition consists of 7 CDs, comprising two separate releases.

The first is the main 4-disc soundtrack, which consists of all the background music that plays during the game. This includes all the hourly music changes, including the different arrangements when the weather is sunny, rainy or snowy, as well as all the other music that plays during special events or in certain locations like the shop, the museum or the town hall.

The second is a 3-disc soundtrack called the Totakeke Instrumental Music Collection. This contains instrumental versions of all 95 of KK Slider’s songs from the game, meaning his odd singing has been removed.

Both the 4-disc soundtrack and the 3-disc KK Slider collection are available to buy separately, but the limited edition also includes a large box to keep both collections in, a special earphone case with KK Slider’s face on it and an art book that contains all the record sleeve artwork for the KK Slider songs (which can be seen in the game in tiny resolution).

All three versions are available for pre-order on the Japanese My Nintendo Store, but the limited edition, which costs ¥11,000 (around $100), has already sold out.

The soundtrack announcement coincides with the 20th anniversary of Animal Crossing. The Japanese Animal Crossing Twitter account posted new artwork to celebrate the occasion, stating: “Thank you to all of you who have enjoyed the game. We hope you will continue to support us in the future.”

The latest game in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, has become one of Nintendo’s best-selling games of all time. Nintendo announced last month that after one year on sale, it had become the fastest-selling Nintendo game ever launched in Europe.

According to Nintendo’s latest financial results, New Horizons had sold 31.18 million copies globally between its March 2020 release and December 31, 2020. In comparison, the Nintendo Switch itself sold 27.3 million units during all of 2020.

As noted by Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad, New Horizons’ impressive sales figures suggest that up to 39% of Nintendo Switch owners have bought Animal Crossing.

It also means that New Horizons is on its way to tripling the lifetime cumulative sales of 12 million for Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which was the previous best-selling entry in the series.

Animal Crossing remains the second highest-selling Nintendo Switch title to date – an achievement it managed in mere months – behind Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (33.41m), which itself continues to show sales momentum with a further 4.42m copies sold in the three months to December 31.