Seattle aquarium & Nintendo team up to bring Animal Crossing: New Horizons to life

[kemdi]

Animal Crossing: New Horizons X Seattle Aquarium Partnership - Seattle Aquarium

Animal Crossing: New Horizons X Seattle Aquarium Partnership The Seattle Aquarium is proud to have hosted an Animal Crossing™: New Horizons themed Aquarium experience, in partnership with Nintendo of America. It was the first aquarium experience like this in North America! The Aquarium’s...

www.seattleaquarium.org

I don't live in Seattle and wont be visiting anytime soon, but this sounds so amazing.

 

[Firesquids]

Oh nice, I'll have to check it out, I live in Washington! Seattle aquarium is great, they've got really cool moon jelly tanks.

 

[S.J.]

Aww, this looks really sweet.

I can imagine cute AC signs next to the museum exhibits, like, "Yellow Perch. Those yellow birds have to sit somewhere!"

 

[Zerous]

This looks really cute!! I’d love to go to something like that if they ever did one near me, and see all the fish

 

[TN4U]

That's pretty cool. There better be a bunch of lame puns on the exhibits. That would be the icing on the cake!

 

[MiniPocketWorld]

I wonder if they will allow pictures. I'll have to remember to look online or youtube and see if there are any just out of curiosity. I live way to far away for that.

 

[VanitasFan26]

Thats cool I guess.

 

[Xara]

i don’t live in seattle and have never been there, nor do i see me being able to visit any time soon, but this is honestly really cool! the bingo scavenger hunt sounds like it’ll be a lot of fun, and blathers providing descriptions for all of the creatures like he does in-game is so cute! i can totally see this being a fun and cute outing for lots of families and kids, regardless of being a fan of animal crossing!

petition for ripley’s aquarium in toronto to do this, too

 

[AccfSally]

I don't live no where near (I live in the South, rip), but it's nice to see something like this happening. I hope those who can go have a wonderful time.

 

[rocketspruggs]

This is cool, even though I live in California, and I'm not going to Seattle anytime soon.

 

[KittenNoir]

That is such a cute idea..... I would love for that to be done in other countries too

 

[TiredStudent]

I want to experience animal crossing museum so bad

 

[Firesquids]

I went to this today and I thought I would share the pictures for anyone who's interested!

Spoiler: Pictures

Today was "Halloween at the Aquarium" and they had a meet and greet with Tom Nook and Isabelle, so I got some pictures with them!

They also had an Animal Crossing backdrop for taking photos (I'm dressed as Redd, my sister is Tom Nook, my friend is in the Froggy hat, I've covered her face for privacy.)

Some scuba divers carved pumpkins underwater, one of which was wearing a froggy hat! (it fell apart a lil bit, but still cute!)

Throughout the rest of the aquarium there were signs with Blathers' descriptions from the games. They also seem to have their own Resident rep for the aquarium sharing additional facts.

Additionally there was a stamp rally just like in New Horizons. There were 4 cardboard standees of Animal Crossing characters to find that were by little booths with candy buckets to trick or treat from, and a person to stamp your card.

I got a free reusable bag for getting all of the stamps.

The gift shop had this display of animal crossing plushies, they were a bit pricey though, ($40 for Flick/Gulliver and $25 for a small Tom Nook, Isabelle, or Blathers' head) I've actually seen these same ones at GameStop and Target in my area so I didn't leave with any of them.

 

[Airysuit]

I went to this today and I thought I would share the pictures for anyone who's interested!

Spoiler: Pictures

Today was "Halloween at the Aquarium" and they had a meet and greet with Tom Nook and Isabelle, so I got some pictures with them!

They also had an Animal Crossing backdrop for taking photos (I'm dressed as Redd, my sister is Tom Nook, my friend is in the Froggy hat, I've covered her face for privacy.)

Some scuba divers carved pumpkins underwater, one of which was wearing a froggy hat! (it fell apart a lil bit, but still cute!)

Throughout the rest of the aquarium there were signs with Blathers' descriptions from the games. They also seem to have their own Resident rep for the aquarium sharing additional facts.

Additionally there was a stamp rally just like in New Horizons. There were 4 cardboard standees of Animal Crossing characters to find that were by little booths with candy buckets to trick or treat from, and a person to stamp your card.

I got a free reusable bag for getting all of the stamps.

The gift shop had this display of animal crossing plushies, they were a bit pricey though, ($40 for Flick/Gulliver and $25 for a small Tom Nook, Isabelle, or Blathers' head) I've actually seen these same ones at GameStop and Target in my area so I didn't leave with any of them.

So fun!!! Ty for posting this! I wish i could go but im on the other side of the world

 

[Thalidan]

That's awesome! If I lived closer I'd 100% go, alas I'm about as far away in the USA as one can get >.< It looks awesome though.
That Flick Pillow Plush thing, I find a heavy need for it.

 

[-Blue-]

Thanks for sharing pics because I would never be able to go there. Flick seems like such an odd choice for a pillow. Do they not have pillows for CJ, Pascal, or any of the others who would feel more appropriate lol.

 

[Firesquids]

Thanks for sharing pics because I would never be able to go there. Flick seems like such an odd choice for a pillow. Do they not have pillows for CJ, Pascal, or any of the others who would feel more appropriate lol.

I thought the same thing! Pascal is my favorite NPC so I would have loved a plush of him or something.

 

[-Blue-]

I thought the same thing! Pascal is my favorite NPC so I would have loved a plush of him or something.

Yeah it almost feels like adding salt to the injury selling Flick pillows out of all the ones they could had chosen lol.

 

[Aerith]

Thank you for sharing pictures! What an adorable crossover, seems like it would be very fun with all the things to look at. It's the other side of the coast for me so I'd never have seen it otherwise.

 

[ParabolaBeam]

Just went to it yesterday since I'm local to the area and I'm actually jealous seeing the pictures of a live Nook and Isabelle because....we did not get that.

We went for the stamp rally that's going on this weekend (there's one more coming in December), but it was incredibly disappointing. The odd plushie choice is odd because they are only selling merch you can get anywhere. No aquarium exclusives, not even a t-shirt like Seattle Aquarium x Animal Crossing or anything. The main difference I'm seeing in our photos is that when we went yesterday there were also AC pez dispensers (woo.) with three to collect: Isabelle, Nook, and K.K. Slider.

Our prize for finishing the rally was not that cute reusable tote either. We got a single piece of fun-sized candy and a large sticker that they said was a decal for the Switch dock. Not only does it not fit at all (it's too big for a Switch lite and too small for the regular switch, we checked both), but they didn't even bother cropping out the ESRB logo on the bottom corner to make the image look clean. It's in fact, the same image as the backdrop in the aquarium and on the back of the stamp rally cards, so it feels like it was copy/pasted three times and then called a day.

Speaking of stamp rally cards: they ran out of originals, so they had to print out more. That would be fine, but they already had stamps printed on the card because they couldn't print without them for some reason. If you weren't lucky enough to grab one of the few right as they opened, you were going around with a knock-off card getting stamps next to the other pre-printed stamps. They also didn't want to give out stamp cards until 3:30 exactly. So if you checked in a little earlier, you then had to get BACK in line for your card. I could understand if it was self-service stamping but the people with the stamps weren't even out until 3:30, so it seemed like an organizational oversight. Especially since they quietly opened the stamp card counter without any signage to indicate it-we almost missed it even though we chose to stand at the front counters and wait for our cards!

Speaking of organizational oversights, I kind of wish they had done the rally earlier in the day. The aquarium cafe closes at 4:00, which is just half an hour after the start of the rally. If the cafe had been open longer, it could have helped divide the flood of crowding people some.

There was a sign near the entrance to scan a QR code to get a digital bingo card, and it encouraged you to use the phone's doodle function to mark off fish you find. Then in little print on the card, it says, "not all fish on the card are in the aquarium".

This event felt like a huge wash for me. I would have really liked to see a lot more effort on Nintendo's part. Animal Crossing New Horizons is their second-highest selling Switch game period behind Mario Kart 8. The fact that they could easily invest in making these in-person experiences memorable with some cute merch that people would leap to buy or just having a little more thought into the events, and then they don't is...beyond comprehension to me. AC fans turn up every time. It'd be so easy to make at least some cute collab merch as a bare minimum but they really, really dropped the ball.

If anyone is thinking of going, make sure you're not just going for the Animal Crossing stuff because it'll probably be very disappointing. If you are going for AC stuff, make sure you get there early (there was a line around the building even 45 minutes before the stamp rally time and Seattle parking is so bad), and I would recommend using the little map they give you to hurry and get stamps before they run out of even the lackluster prizes, then continuing to enjoy the aquarium at your leisure.

Sorry if this sounds negative, just wanted to let people know what they're in for if they decide to visit.