Starting in the year 2031, you will be unable to play the original Animal Crossing on the Nintendo GameCube. Not literally — at least, I hope not — but you will no longer be able to play the game as it was intended: with a clock that reflects the progression of time in the real world.
Animal Crossing is a game about an idyllic virtual existence lived in harmony with your actual life. As I’m writing this, it’s a Tuesday on July 11th at 10 AM in the year 2023, which means that, somewhere, any number of my Animal Crossing games will reflect the exact same season and time if I load them up. This concept, popularized in the years since by everything from mobile games to MMOs, is the core of the entire franchise, allowing you to build a life through days and weeks and months of incremental labor.