Featured Image Credit: Nintendo
Topics: Animal Crossing, Nintendo, Tech, PC, Retro Gaming
A native port of the original Animal Crossing has made its way over to PC, free to check out for owners of the GameCube original.
While Xbox and PlayStation have brought their games to PC in the past to varying levels of success, Nintendo is the one publisher that you’re probably never likely to see make the same move.
Nevertheless, fans have successfully managed to get the game running natively on PC as part of the Animal Crossing Decompilation Project, which is now available for you to play on your computer.
If you want to try it out for yourself, you can grab the download from the project's GitHub page. However, you’ll still need to own a copy of Animal Crossing on GameCube, as the repository doesn’t actually include any game assets or assembly. Instead, it reads it all from the disc.
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The quality of the port is generally in a good place at the moment, allowing you to play almost the entire game without any major issues.
However, some bugs and glitches have still been reported, including some random memory issues which can break the game’s loading screens and textures, as well as some problems with audio.
Still, it might be enough to encourage you to dig out that dusty old copy of the game that’s sitting up in your attic, unplayed for many years.
In case you’re not aware of what exactly decompilation is, it’s basically a way of extracting a game’s machine code and reverting it back to its source code.
This can allow you to create a PC port that runs natively on your machine, without any emulation trickery going on. It also leads to new features and functions being added that go beyond what’s possible via emulation.
The process of decompilation is extremely complicated, which is why these projects can take years to complete, and also why bugs and other issues still crop up even after a decomp has been completed.
Many decompilation projects have made great progress in the last few years. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64 was successfully decompiled in 2021, which led to the release of Ship of Harkinian a year later.
Other Nintendo games which have received similar treatment include The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, which got a PC port called 2Ship2Harkinian, and Star Fox 64, called StarShip. PC ports of Mario Kart 64 (called SpaghettiKart) and Super Mario 64 (called Ghostship) were also released between 2025 and 2026.