With the fifth anniversary of “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” looming large on March 20, 2025, I’ve decided to reflect on my history with the game—just how many hours in the past five years have I spent on this virtual island?
After a bit of Nintendo Switch deep digging, I found that I have played at least 675 hours of the game. This timestamp alone is absurd, but in complete transparency, I expected a higher number. By the time I returned to in-person schooling in January 2021, near the end of the all-encompassing COVID-19 shutdown, I had already racked up over 550 hours in under a year. But over the last four years, I have spent no more than 125 hours playing “New Horizons.” When COVID-19 left my daily life, so did “New Horizons.”
The conspiratorial part of me wonders if the game designers knew that the pandemic was coming and planned for the perfect release date, but I recognize that they probably just turned immense luck into millions in sales. With my middle school career promptly ending after the pandemic was named a national emergency on March 13, 2020, I often played New Horizons just to fill the void of time.
I played constantly because I had a knack for it. I recently took a nostalgic day trip back to my island, which I named Trinidad, after my mother’s home country. The map is one I’m proud of even after all these years, filled to the brim with life.
The island features bountiful amenities that I built with my own two fingerless villager hands: a library, a sushi restaurant, a zen garden, multiple tiki bars, and even a diving board off the island’s coast. My villagers are a collection of adorable and popular faces that the Animal Crossing community would call “cuties.” I even have the most popular villager in Animal Crossing history: Raymond, the business cat, who lives in the upscale residential neighborhood with all of my other villagers. Each abode boasts a personalized front porch—in his case, an outdoor office complete with wood flooring, an office set, and a folding floor lamp.
But that was Trinidad at its prime. Now, lifting my eyes from the map, I find my idyllic island has become a deserted fun land. The ground is covered in overgrown weeds that spread in little colonies, and my house is flooded with cockroaches. My villagers simultaneously greet me and guilt me for leaving them behind, the natural product of the near-total radio silence they’ve endured these past few years. Raymond, my favorite smug, big business cat, even goes so far as to ask if I am a ghost. He only exists to me when I open the game, yet he questions my absence, implying his life has gone on sadly without me. Raymond speaks of how he missed me, as if we were old friends on equal footing, until I abandoned him for reasons unknown. Although strange to admit, I do feel guilty.
Part of this remorse stems from the fact that Raymond came to live on this island through my own corrupt bargains. I traded him on the Animal Crossing Discord server like an accessory, using a currency known as “Nook Mile Tickets” (NMTs). In his eyes, we were close friends, but the truth is I bought him online for a few hundred NMTs just because I thought he would improve my island’s aesthetic. I wanted my island to exceed any others I had encountered, so I physically harassed my unwanted villagers, the “uglies,” whacking them with bug nets so they would leave. I bought and sold villagers based solely on their looks; to replace the “uglies,” I invited other “cuties” the same way as I did Raymond: under false pretenses and with cash transactions.
There is no recourse for my cruelty. Every conversation with a villager in Animal Crossing is scripted. So, even if I told my villagers the truth, that I am never coming back and they live in a Truman Show-like existence for my own entertainment, they could not possibly understand their existence and my unforgivable actions.
I might sound crazy, guilt-tripping myself for lying to imaginary friends. I may have over-imbued these virtual critters with real emotions and feelings, but I also know that I am not alone in transposing the human experience onto undeserving subjects. Some people scold their Alexas or introduce their guitars with names, and I used to pretend that my villagers had human feelings so I could feel less alone during the pandemic.
In all seriousness, I bear a deep sense of regret when I enter the Animal Crossing world and interact with my villagers again. There is a lot I could have done had I not spent 675 hours on the game alone. I could have started writing much earlier. I could have learned to play guitar and watched more movies with my father. Instead, I have an idyllic yet lonely and corrupt island that means nothing in the real world. Leisure time is important, and “New Horizons” is a masterpiece, but at a certain point, don’t the opportunity costs outweigh its benefit?
Considering the tightly wound person I am today, the amount of time I spent playing “New Horizons” amazes me. Once the world came back, I put my “weird phase” behind me as I dove head-first into my schoolwork and extracurriculars. In trying to make up for lost time, I likely swung the pendulum too far in the other direction and became unable to truly take a break. Perhaps that easygoing, nonchalant person I was still resides on my decrepit “New Horizons” island—and maybe it is time to make another visit, knowing that those 675 hours weren’t lost completely.
