Challenge One Shelf: Animal Crossing

 Mario can't croon boy, don't ya agree?

Now this is an important one.

Whilst Nintendo had always positioned itself as a family-friendly company, it wasn't until Animal Crossing (which debuted on the N64 in Japan) that we saw the beginnings of the open-to-all design philosophy that subsequently allowed Nintendo to dominate the market with the DS and Wii.

A string of identikit sequels later and it's easy to forget just how forward-thinking the first Animal Crossing was. Before this, games almost always punished ineffective players with virtual death and/or the undoing of progress they'd made. Here players lost virtual friends. Inevitably, that stung more than losing virtual lifes.

Whilst conscientious players who tended to their village's vegetation with care while making generous donations to the local museum could expect frequent new arrivals to town, the more neglectful would find their fellow residents talking about how they fancied a change of scenery. A couple of days later they'd be gone, never to be seen again, leaving only a lousy letter to say goodbye.

More importantly, when you turned the game on you couldn't know what to expect. You'd have plenty of humdrum days, where all you'd do would be maybe dig up a couple of fossils, catch a fish or three and run some errands for the townsfolk – and that had plenty of appeal in itself – but on others you'd get some kind of special event. It might be a quirky stranger washed up on the beach, a calendar-triggered fireworks display or a fishing contest. Or 100 other things. The key was that just as you might think that you'd seen all there was to see, the game would turn around and prove you wrong.

Yet perhaps the most ballsy element in Animal Crossing was Nintendo's decision to make a game built for online play on a console with no online functionality. Save games ate up entire memory cards, but by putting a buddy's town in the second slot you could trade with each other and wander around each other's worlds. Posting memory cards to people you'd only ever met on forums was time-consuming, impractical and risky, yet the game's grip was so strong that a number of communities sprung up online to enable just that.

Now of course the internet is swollen with videogames tied to social networks, and chances are that scene wouldn't exist (or at least, would have taken far longer to develop) without Animal Crossing. So perhaps the most amazing thing about Animal Crossing is that on balance, it's good enough to make the existence of Farmville a price worth paying.