A club might not be the first place one would expect to see a random Animal Crossing reference, but that is exactly what one fan in the UK found recently when they discovered the well-loved Froggy Chair graffitied on a wall. Nintendo’s colorful life sim series has been charming fans for over 20 years now, so it’s not all that surprising that fans are making their love of Animal Crossing known in various ways, random wall graffiti included.
Many elements of Animal Crossing have earned an iconic status among players throughout the decades. Recurring characters like Tom Nook and Isabelle have endeared themselves to millions of fans, and the cozy gameplay has inspired its fair share of competitors in the genre. When it comes to icons, though, few have proven as delightful or endearing as the Froggy Chair, a furniture item whose amphibian smiley face has been winning hearts since the days of the Nintendo GameCube.
Such is the popularity of the frog-themed seat that it’s led to it being referenced outside of Animal Crossing fairly frequently, with recent appearances including a cameo in an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. And now another appearance comes courtesy of a Reddit user known as DefectiveHumour, who shared a photo of a Froggy Chair graffiti doodle in a club in Cardiff, Wales. It’s not known who put the doodle there, but whoever drew it added a little extra touch of their own, giving it a pair of slanted eyebrows that make the normally friendly chair look a little mischievous.
DefectiveHumour’s find has amassed over 1,600 upvotes on Reddit as of this writing, so it’s safe to say that people are enjoying this latest Froggy Chair appearance. Although the post doesn’t specify which club they found the graffiti in, a few of the comments point to NQ64, a club in Cardiff that features a wide range of games for customers to play, including setups for playing classic Nintendo 64 and GameCube games. A rather fitting place, then, to find random Animal Crossing fan art.
As of early 2023, the future of Animal Crossing is unknown. Major updates for Animal Crossing: New Horizons stopped coming out a long while ago, and word of its followup has yet to emerge. Despite that, however, fans have continued to engage with the series, continuing to play New Horizons and celebrating their love with new pieces of Animal Crossing fan art. The Froggy Chair graffiti in Cardiff is just one of the latest examples, and proves that one never knows where Animal Crossing will be referenced next.
Released in September 2022, the third installment in Nintendo’s third-person shooter franchise has been met with fan adoration and critical acclaim alike. The title was a particularly big hit in its developer’s home country, as previously illustrated by the fact that Splatoon 3 was Japan’s most downloaded Switch game in 2022. Nintendo hasn’t been resting on its laurels following that success, as Splatoon 3 has been enjoying steady updates ever since.
One such upcoming addition to the game will arrive in the form of a service called Tournament Manager meant to facilitate the process of creating and running private competitions. The feature was teased in an update to the official overview of the Splatoon 3-focused Nintendo Direct that took place in August 2022. First spotted by dataminer OatmealDome, the updated version of the page states that Tournament Manager is envisioned as a service that will support competition bracket creation and round progression, as well as automate the process of setting up Private Battle rooms for tourneys.
Tournament Manager will also offer automatic reports of match results, as per the same source. While Nintendo has yet to elaborate on how all of that functionality will work in practice, the company did confirm that Tournament Manager will act as a link between Splatoon 3 and the SplatNet 3 app. Its existing feature list is labeled as still being subject to change, and it is currently unclear when exactly the service is planned to go live.
In the meantime, a similar Tournament Manager teaser shared by Nintendo’s Japanese branch revealed that the platform will even have its own logo. The graphic was designed like a shield-shaped emblem featuring the yellow squid from the Splatoon 3 logo flanked by two yellow arrows curving upward.
Nintendo hasn’t outright confirmed that Tournament Manager will work offline, although that’s presumably the case. For clarity, Splatoon 3 offers limited offline multiplayer functionality, as both its Salmon Run and Turf War modes boast local co-op support. The only catch is that the game doesn’t have split-screen multiplayer, so every player needs to have their own Switch. This was also the case with the previous entries in the series going all the way back to the 2015 original for the Wii U.