2 Years Since Animal Crossing’s Nightmare Easter Egg Invasion: Remembering Bunny Day 2020 Chaos

1 year ago 9 Comments

It’s that time of year again — the eggtacular season when Animal Crossing: New Horizons islands become overrun with Easter eggs of every shape and size, whether you want them or not!

With this year’s 2022 edition of Bunny Day starting today on April 10th, we thought it’d be a great time to reflect back on the game’s very first Bunny Day event back in 2020 and all of the chaos that came with it. Honestly, we can’t help feel a little bit nostalgic now!

Let’s start by painting a picture of the scene: it’s April 1st, 2020 and the most awaited Animal Crossing game in history released just ten days ago in the midst of a global shutdown of the entire world.

Millions of fans around the world are having a blast indulging in this new experience together, building the beginnings of their islands, and starting to fill out their Critterpedias with plenty of fish and bugs.

Spending great lengths of time searching for flying balloons in the sky and message bottles on the shore was a popular pastime too, with the main goal of unlocking some coveted new DIY Crafting recipes that formed the foundation of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

The Surprise Egg Invasion

Just ten days after the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons though, Nintendo launched the game’s very first holiday event and significant update bringing Bunny Day activites to islands everywhere.

At first, this marked an exciting new piece of significant content for an incredible game that was already impressive, and arriving so soon after launch could only add to the excitement.

But soon, fans would discover that Bunny Day wasn’t simply a side event to complement their Animal Crossing experience. No, it was a complete takeover of your island! Those damn Bunny Day eggs felt like they were everywhere.

Login to the game, see Bunny Day balloons floating in the sky. Go chopping down trees for some wood materials, find Bunny Day eggs falling from the leaves. Check the beach for a message bottle, find an egg bottle. You couldn’t escape them, and so the memes ensued.

Just want to catch some new fish to complete the Critterpedia or pay off your loan to Tom Nook? You’re probably gonna catch eggs 33% of the time. To that end, players in the community even made guides on how to spot fish shadows that weren’t eggs!

Worst of all, the Bunny Day 2020 event was set to stick around for almost two full weeks, even though many fans were ready to call it quits after a mere couple days. Typically with most other Animal Crossing events, you could say goodbye to all of the shenanigans after just a single day, but not this one.

‘Do You Have Tips For Less Eggs?’

As a personal anecdote for a moment, I vividly remember Bunny Day’s 2020 launch reaction from just one particular piece of content I worked on for Animal Crossing World.

At the time, I was experimenting with more video content and spent many hours on what initially seemed like an obviously helpful YouTube piece entitled 3 Tips & Tricks to Find More Eggs During Bunny Day. In part, I chose to spend time on this video with an accompanying article because I envisioned it would have lasting potential, given Bunny Day was a 12 day long event.

As it goes in this space, it was essential that the content be released in a timely manner, so I focused hard on getting it out before the end of the first event day — without paying too much attention to the ongoing social media conversation around Bunny Day’s overwhelming amount of eggs.

After much work, I was able to get everything published by the late evening of April 1st, and honestly feeling quite proud of myself. It didn’t take long for comments to come in, except they weren’t exactly what I was expecting to hear.

‘Do you have tips and tricks for finding less eggs?’ one viewer wrote on the blog. ‘Is this a joke? I see eggs in my dreams’ another remarked, probably wondering what was wrong with me. In just one day, the Animal Crossing community had already decided they had more than enough of seeing eggs on their island, and there was still another 11 days left to go before Bunny Day would end! Whoops.

Bunny Day + Cherry Blossoms + Pandemic = Unfortunate Timing

Possibly the biggest pitfall of Bunny Day 2020 is simply a critical fault in the timing of both Bunny Day and Cherry Blossom season.

Both the Bunny Day event period and Cherry Blossom season began on the exact same day of April 1st, with the Cherry Blossom Petals promising other new items that some fans found far more appealing than an Easter set.

This isn’t Nintendo’s fault really — they designed the game’s events and seasons for a lifetime of play, not just the one year of 2020. But well-meaning intent aside, it was a disaster how these two in-game moments completely collided with each other.

Cherry Blossom recipes could largely be only obtained from shooting down Balloon Presents in the sky, while the Bunny Day event flooded skies with egg-themed Balloon Presents all day long. Fans universally wanted the beautiful Cherry Blossom items, but didn’t care too much about Easter items — yet the former was much harder to find.

Again, this isn’t an issue in most years as the date of Easter changes yearly on the calendar and Cherry Blossoms aren’t completely overlapping usually, but it’s just so unfortunate that the launch year of Animal Crossing: New Horizons was 2020 where this perfect collusion occurs.

It can’t be forgotten either that Animal Crossing: New Horizons unexpectedly launched during the midst of a global pandemic where many fans were essentially locked in their homes with nothing fun to do for leisure, besides playing way too much Animal Crossing.

So while Nintendo may have designed the Bunny Day event expecting players to collect eggs for just an hour each day through the 12 day period, plenty were actually spending upwards of 12 hours a day experiencing the egg takeover! That’s just not something that could have been predicted until it was too late.

Nintendo Takes Action To Our Surprise

The complaints on social media about Bunny Day’s egg invasion were so loud and widespread that Nintendo took an unprecedented step of issuing a quick patch changing the event’s spawn rates before it even ended.

Version 1.1.4 of Animal Crossing: New Horizons released on April 6th, 2020 at the half way mark through the Bunny Day event with the following very important patch note:

Adjusted the appearance rate of some Bunny Day eggs through 11.04.2020.

Anyone who’s been a Nintendo fan for a long time knows that the company isn’t exactly well known for their quick and nimble response to online fan feedback, so it really speaks volumes that a quick patch was released in such a circumstance!

Beyond adjusting down the rate of appearance for eggs during Bunny Day, Nintendo went one step further the next year in 2021 by shortening the event’s duration to only 7 days — a far more appropriate amount of time to hunt eggs.

That’s significantly down from the initial 12 day period that Bunny Day was held from April 1st to 12th, 2020 in the first year of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In other words, the developers acknowledged that 12 days of those initial Bunny Day egg spawn rates were just too much.

Your Bunny Day Memories

I hope you enjoyed this nostalgic return to the early days of Animal Crossing: New Horizons as much as I did writing it! Through all the ups and downs, it was certainly an amusing time to be an Animal Crossing fan and I won’t forget it, and the memes.

If you played the game back in April 2020 and have vivid memories of the Bunny Day event too like me, I invite you to share them in the comments below! And if you happen to be playing Bunny Day 2022 this week, check out our Bunny Day event guide here and Bunny Day Set items guide here.

Stay tuned to Animal Crossing World for everything on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, including our extensive Guides section here. Our most popular pages include Bunny Day Event, Cherry Blossom Petal Recipes, Series 5 Amiibo Cards, 16 New Villagers in Version 2.0, All 9000+ New Items In Version 2.0, Redd Art, Sea Creatures, and Villager House Exteriors.

Get The Latest Animal Crossing News & Guides

Sign up for our newsletter to never miss out on the latest Animal Crossing news, guides, and deals with email updates!

You may also like

Animal Crossing: New Horizons Editorials News

Subscribe
Notify of

9 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments