Animal Crossing Was Meant to Have "Drivatar" Technology, Says Nintendo

Driveatar, the technology behind Forza 5’s advance driver AI, has been the source of much acclaim for Microsoft since it was unveiled alongside the Xbox One launch title. But as we have recently found, it was not always meant to be a way to change how your opponents race.


Many inside sources have confirmed the rumors that Nintendo in fact was the developer of the Driveatar technology - originally codenamed “Crossatar” - and was meant to be used in an unreleased Animal Crossing game. It was said that Crossatar would interpret how human players interacted with the towns of Animal Crossing and the villagers would mimic, and even build off, the behavior.

Unlike in Forza, the technology just wasn’t a fit. “We had a lot of trouble implementing it and eventually just scrapped the whole thing” one anonymous engineer admitted. “It started with small oddities in the villagers behaviors. Things like shaking trees non-stop and changing the town tune multiple times in a single hour. But then, after a few weeks,” the engineer continued “it began to get vulgar. Every pattern in the Abel Sister’s shop was nothing but dicks. At first they were just basic outlines, but after a while,” it was visible the middle-aged engineer before us was beginning to mentally break down - having to take several moments to collect himself “they became horribly detailed. Veins, hair, everything. We didn’t even know the basic pattern design tools were capable of that!”

As he went on, we learned that apparently that wasn’t the worst of it, “All of that we could fix, sure. We could just remove patterns and axes and nets. It might limit the game but were desperate to get this Crossatar technology working - it was Animal Crossing’s big break!”

“It wasn’t until they started doing things we didn’t even remember programming that the higher ups got freaked out. Villagers would form into odd circles and the screen would turn red, then black. And when it re-appeared one random villager would be gone. That wasn’t in the code! We never programmed that! What the fuck!”

The rest of his tale was told mostly through sobs and desperate sign language, but from what we could make out fan favorite villager Cube the Penguin would often host what programmers considered “villager orgies” where clothes would clip off the in-game models and they would shake violently until the player left Cube’s house.

As a Nintendo executive put it to us “we were scared of the technology so we just dumped it to the highest bidder and told them to not tell anyone where it came from.” In this case it was the giant from Redmond, Microsoft. “I fear for their Forza franchise,” he told us “I’m not sure if cars can wield axes or have orgies but I wouldn’t count it out of Crossatars abilities.”