Everybody Loves Raymond

Everybody Loves Raymond

We’re celebrating iconic videogame characters through our festive programme at the Museum, through new playable games, displays, blog posts and our social media advent calendar. In this blog we focus on one of Animal Crossing’s villagers.

Raymond is a villager character from the videogame Animal Crossing: New Horizons (AC:NH). AC:NH is a Nintendo game released for it’s Switch console in March 2020. In the game, the player character creates a village on an island and makes friends with the anthropomorphic animals who live amongst them known as villagers.

AC:NH was released on the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic and was incredibly popular. It has sold over 40 million units to date, partly because it allowed players to hang out with their friends and interact with others in digital spaces. The National Videogame Museum’s Animal Crossing Diaries Project explored these phenomena in more depth.

A Smug Cat Named Raymond

Now – let’s talk about Raymond. Raymond, a grey cat, was first introduced in the 2017 mobile game Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. Raymond is a smug villager. “Smug” being one of eight different personalities that villagers in AC:NH can have. Being smug means he can be a little full of himself, but it also makes him gentlemanly and charming.

When he arrives on your island, he wears a smart little suit and black framed glasses. It makes him rather adorable to look at! He also has heterochromia, meaning his irises are different colours, and is the one of only 2 villagers to have this (there are over 400 villagers in total!) One of our Animal Crossing Diaries Project submissions about Raymond reads: 

Showing The Love

There are lots of other smug villagers, and other cat villagers. But it was Raymond that found a special place in the hearts of Animal Crossing players and he quickly skyrocketed into massive popularity.

Players loved Raymond and wanted to celebrate him in-game and with each other. In the Animal Crossing Diaries Project we got a submission of a letter sent in-game in AC:NH, with the title “I love you catboy” (referring to Raymond). There are countless drawings of fan art of Raymond, memes about Raymond and people making their own Raymond plushies and costumes. There’s even animated YouTube clips featuring everyone’s favourite, fuzzy animal crossing cat!  

Profiting Off Popularity

However, some people tried to profit off of Raymond’s popularity. Players were charging others a fee to come visit Raymond on their island (if they were lucky enough to find him).

In AC:NH players could ask a villager to come live with them from someone else’s island. Players were charging each other up to 1 million bells (the game’s in-game currency), or sometimes 100 Nook Miles tickets (which would have taken 10s of hours of real life time to obtain), for Raymond.  Some players were even charging each other real life money, up to $1000 in some instances, to buy Raymond from other players. It was safe to say, Raymond was in high demand. 

Chance Encounter

Raymond’s popularity was partly driven by his precarity. Because players randomly come across villagers, the chance of finding Raymond yourself was literally 1 in 413. At the time of release Raymond also didn’t have an amiibo card. These are cards which Nintendo make and can be used to call specific villagers to your island. In November 2021, an amiibo card for Raymond finally released. His amiibo card can now be obtained for approximately £5 second hand with ease, meaning Raymond no longer brings in millions of bells or Nook Miles tickets. But maybe this is a good thing.

We can still love Raymond even if he is easier to find! Raymond is a special little guy. A funky cat we all grew to love, particularly during the isolation of the pandemic. We don’t need to pay lots of in-game, or real life, money to prove he’s special.