Katsuya Eguchi came home late. By his own account, he always did.
His family played games, and some nights they were still playing when he walked in. He put the thought to himself later, in an interview: they were playing games, and he was playing games, but they were not really doing it together.
The gap was small and ordinary. Nobody was at fault. Work ran long, the family was awake, and the two schedules simply did not meet. Eguchi was a game director at Nintendo, and he took the problem to the only place he knew how to take it.
He asked for a play experience where people were not playing at the same time but were still sharing things. In his words, it was a desire to create a space where his family and he could interact more, even if they were not playing together.
That desire became Dōbutsu no Mori, called Animal Forest in English. It was first planned for the Nintendo 64DD, then moved to the regular Nintendo 64, and it was released in Japan on April 14, 2001. Eguchi directed it, working with Hisashi Nogami and Takashi Tezuka. The village it built did not wait for the player to press a button. Time passed there whether anyone was watching or not.
In 2006, at the Game Developers Conference, Eguchi sat down with Gamasutra and was asked about the village's rules. He said: "We consciously avoided any disaster type situations. There are no earthquakes, or storms that tear your buildings down or anything like that."
He did not say the village stood still. Weeds pop up, he said, and cockroaches can appear in town if you have not been there for a while. The game is set in a natural setting, so if you move the clock forward, weeds are going to come and plants are going to die. "It's not built in to punish people," he said. "It's just by way of saying that time traveling is dangerous!"
The interviewer had put it bluntly: sometimes the game feels like it punishes players for not playing. Eguchi answered without defending himself. "I didn't really want people to feel like they were being punished for not playing."
A person who comes home late is a person who was away. Most games treat being away as a failure, and keep score. This one let the weeds grow a little and then let you pull them. Somewhere in your own house, someone is playing a different game in a different hour. What would you leave for them to find?