The Game That Helped Millions Feel Less Alone

24 July 2025

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the-game-that-helped-millions-feel-less-alone — The Game That Helped Millions Feel Less Alone

I like to flatter myself that I’m still relatively young. Nevertheless, like everyone who grew up in the 90s, I’ve certainly seen a lot in my life to date. The Covid lockdown, as I experienced it here in the U.K., was one thing I’ll never forget.

Like so many families, I lost a loved one during that time, and was sustained by video calls. It was awful, and it’ll linger, but we clung to the bright spots we could. A significant one was the timely arrival of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

When the game launched in March 2020, starting a new life on a digital desert island seemed like an intriguing prospect. I’d live in a tent, and have a fitness fanatic of a penguin who seemed obsessed with my abs as my closest neighbor, but I’d still chalk this up as an improvement on reality overall.

The previous game, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, had been my favorite yet. Town projects offered the chance to customize the town itself as well as your house, and house customizing in the beloved Animal Crossing series is at least 60% of my entire personality at this point.

New Horizons, added the chance to place furniture outside, and even terraform the land. It was astonishing freedom for the series, and that was exactly what I was craving at a time of social distancing and barely leaving the house.

I was far from alone in that sentiment. Per gamesindustry.biz, the game achieved 13.4 million sales in six weeks. By the end of March 2025, according to Nintendo, those numbers stood at 47.82 million.

Of course, millions of those were surely existing Animal Crossing lovers, who would have bought the game whether the real world was falling apart at the seams or not. What was surprising, though, was the impact New Horizons had on those who weren’t so committed to the series previously. We can’t yet tell which direction the next game in the series will take, but this entry was an absolute highlight for me.

My sister, for instance, is the furthest thing from a regular gamer, but has pumped 750+ hours into New Horizons. It’s still practically the only thing she’s played on her Switch, but she’s certainly got a beautiful town.

Animal Crossing New Horizons art gallery with paintings and statues, museum outside view

Looking for art to decorate your museum in Animal Crossing New Horizons? Here’s how to not get scammed.

In the broader community, there were tales of regular friend meetings being held in the game, when it wasn’t an option in person. Of weddings, even, being staged in New Horizons. You’ll even grow to love interacting with your villagers, regardless of whether they’re popular ones or not.

As befits the game’s largely structure-free approach, there isn’t much for other players to do, specifically, when they come to your town online. However, this allowed groups to make their own silly fun, at a time when that was needed more than ever.

It’s one of the coziest multilayer experiences I can imagine. Later that year, scientific research emerged to support some of the things millions of players were experiencing.

In November 2020, Professor Andrew Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, co-created the study “Videogame play is positively correlated with well-being.” The idea was to survey 3,000 players on their experiences with two titles: Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville.

Of course, these two games have some social elements in common, but are very different. Nonetheless, despite the small sample size, the survey drew on gameplay data provided by Nintendo of America and EA, and reached some interesting conclusions. The University of Oxford reported at the time:

“The study suggests that experiences of competence and social connection with others through play may contribute to people’s well-being. Indeed, those who derived enjoyment from playing were more likely to report experiencing positive well-being.”

Those very social connections were sorely missed during the Covid lockdowns around the world. Gaming helped provide a crucial outlet and New Horizons was right at the forefront of that.

For me, it provided a sort of unique joy, in a similar fashion to the early days of Pokemon Go. It was new, it was novel, and it was perhaps much more important than we realized.

Today, over five years since the game’s release, I rarely log in to my once-beloved town of Memoria. Flowers have grown to cover literally every square of space on my island it’s possible for them to grow on.

Even so, just as I’ll never forget those challenging times, I’ll always be grateful for New Horizons and the outlet it provided me, my family and friends, and the wider global community. That fantastically chill soundtrack alone still comforts me a great deal.