The Animal Crossing Zine you see before you was put together by Dan McKeon and Pretty Cool Poetry Thing over the course of about a year and a half or so. We always wanted to make a poetry collection of Animal Crossing-centric writing, and the announcement and release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons really gave us the fire to actually get this project going. We originally planned for this to be another print zine among our general issues, but in January we came to the tough decision to end PCPT after publishing the Animal Crossing collection.
Then the pandemic hit and really knocked the wind out of our sails. We reopened submissions for new poems about Animal Crossing, given this wild new context we were now living and playing in. That's when we also decided to make this issue our real last hurrah, to go out with a bang and with something special. So we made this: a website where our beloved Bart the Chameleon becomes a villager and guides you through a virtual reading of all poems Animal Crossing.
Pretty Cool Poetry Thing was a postal-oriented literary magazine that ran from about 2016 to 2020, printed mostly on index cards, that paid each featured poet for their poems. We ran through Patreon and mailed out our issues seasonally to each Patreon donor. The staff included editor-in-chief Dan McKeon and art editor Rose Guilfoyle, with help from Andrea Oaks, Meg Specksgoor and Bart the Chameleon (RIP)
Throughout all the issues and Twitter bits, a lovely distant but warm community formed, and we had such a GOOD time doing all of this. Friendships grew, poetry spread, memes developed, etc. We really do thank you all for joining us on this project as we fumbled and stumbled around into becoming a lit mag
Programming work was done by Dan McKeon, using JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, Bootstrap and Node.js. Bart's voiceovers were built off of Acedio's Animalese.js generator in combination with Typewriter JS to approximate the speech functions. CSS was built off of some of the elements from Turnip Prophet.
The background track was made by our good friends Lydia Dake and Allison Froio from the band Candy Isle. Bart the Chameleon was drawn by PCPT art editor Rose Guilfoyle.
Any questions about this project or inquiries about possible projects can be sent to Dan at dmckeon495@gmail.com