The History of Limited Edition Animal Crossing Consoles

With the latest reveal of the New Horizons themed Switch console, we thought it'd be interesting to go over the other AC variants Nintendo consoles have received. The Animal Crossing series has been available to play on a number of Nintendo systems, including the N64, GameCube, Nintendo DS, Wii, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, and soon, the Nintendo Switch, so there's a lot to get into!

Chronologically, we'll work along the release dates, and will only include official releases, so third party protective shells and cases won't be included. The first game released on the N64 and was exclusive to Japan, and sadly didn't see any limited edition consoles alongside initial it's release. However, when the game was updated and re-released for the Nintendo GameCube, it saw a very slight variation. Though it wasn't the console itself, but rather the GameCube face plate. Club Nintendo in Japan had a few limited edition face plates available for 300 points, one of them being an Animal Crossing one, which included Timmy and Tommy. This was the very first time we saw some sort of Animal Crossing "edition", but was exclusive to Japan.

The next release for the series was Animal Crossing: Wild World for the Nintendo DS, and arguably has some of the rarest limited editions of gaming in general, period. The consoles were only available in Sweden, and were a competition for designing a character for Wild World. Only one of each variation was ever released - a Spring, Autumn and Winter themed DS console - and some believe it's a myth and these consoles don't even exist. That said, Youtuber LSuperSonicQ has done a deepdive himself, and actually tracked down one of these console winners who sent him photos to prove the Spring console is actually legit.

Currently, no one has been able to track down the Winter themed console, but the Autumn one was tracked down. Apparently, the Autumn one was not rewarded as a contest prize, and was instead given as a thank you present to a game store. Again, Youtuber LSuperSonicQ has made a very in-depth video on this, and even hypothesises there very well may be a Summer themed DS out there somewhere... Hopefully one day this DS will see the light of day, if it even exists at all. Their videos are very detailed, so we strongly recommend you check them out if you want to learn more!

There was also the Lime Green Nintendo DS bundle which came packed with Wild World, but this was nothing but a lime green DS system, and had no Animal Crossing decor attached.

Next up we saw Animal Crossing: City Folk release on the Nintendo Wii, but sadly no limited edition consoles were released with the Wii title. It wasn't until the Nintendo 3DS we finally saw some readily available exclusive consoles. Probably the most infamous Animal Crossing themed console, would be the New Leaf themed Nintendo 3DS XL, also dubbed the poptart, which would be the first of many AC consoles in the 3DS family.

After a couple of years, Happy Home Designer released and with it came an exclusive new 3DS XL console. The new 3DS console also released around this time, which had some exclusive HHD face plates, as well as some other Animal Crossing face plates released alongside.

With the 3DS, 3DS XL, 3DS, new 3DS and new 3DS XL, we thought we'd seen the last of the updates in the Nintendo 3DS family, but then we were graced with the new Nintendo 2DS XL, which also introduced a sweet looking console. This one is our personal favorite, and we were very tempted to pick one up when it released back in 2018. Ultimately, we decided against it, but it's still a lovely piece of Nintendo hardware.

And that brings us to the present day with the Nintendo Switch, which as you all know, had a special edition announced just yesterday. This is also a lovely design and is a very close second to the New 2DS XL console.

That was all the consoles we could find, if we've missed any be sure to let us know and we'll update this post accordingly. If you have a favourite console variation, why not let us know in the comments below? 

If posts like these interest you, be sure to follow BidoofCrossing on Twitter and Tumblr to stay up to date with the latest Animal Crossing and Nintendo news! We've also done some deep dive posts that go over what changed during the development of previous Animal Crossing titles, which you can read here.