A Never Before Seen Animal Crossing Villager Has Been Discovered

A game developer has discovered a brand-new Animal Crossing villager that never made it into the game.

One of the best parts of the Animal Crossing franchise is the colorful cast of characters that comes with each new game. But with so many games, each with their own set of returning and new villagers, there has to be at least one cut character who unfortunately never got to see the light of day. That is, until now.

Matthew Lombardo, a game developer known by the handle @lombTV on Twitter, was responsible for the discovery. He was able to access the leaked files from the recent Nintendo “Gigaleak”. The “Gigaleak” is the name gamers have dubbed the recent postings of undiscovered code and files from Nintendo titles, like Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda. Using the already leaked files, Lombardo was able to find something that might be of interest to Animal Crossing fans - a never-before-seen villager!

The villager referred to as “CAT13”, is an unused cat villager who was originally designed to make an appearance in 2002’s Animal Crossing for the GameCube console. To get a better look at this villager, Lombardo decided to put CAT13’s model into a game. He also gave her the nickname “Catty” in lieu of whatever her original name was intended to be.

Lombardo decided to put Catty into Dōbutsu no Mori e+, also known as Animal Crossing e+. If you don’t recognize this Animal Crossing title, it’s probably because it was a Japan-exclusive; Kotaku describes this game as “an enhanced version of the GameCube Animal Crossing that was only released in Japan.”

Judging by Catty’s appearance, it’s not entirely too surprising that her model never made it into an Animal Crossing game. The developer’s decision to create a character with dark black fur and big pink lips is a pretty insensitive design, especially for Western audiences. Just look at Jane, the villager whose appearance was changed from Japan versions to international ones in order to avoid any racist implications. Of course, like Jane, perhaps Catty’s appearance could’ve been changed as well to make her design more considerate.

While there’s no direct word from Nintendo regarding why this grumpy-looking cat never made it into an Animal Crossing game, it’s definitely cool to see this behind the scenes content thanks to the skills of Mr. Lombardo!

Source: Polygon, Kotaku