Never-before-seen Animal Crossing villager discovered in Gigaleak files

There are so many files to dig through within the Gigaleak, a collection of leaked files from classic Nintendo games like Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World. As it turns out, there are also files from Nintendo’s original Animal Crossing game, called Dōbutsu no Mori, which was released in 2001. An enhanced version of Dōbutsu no Mori, called Dōbutsu no Mori+, was released as Animal Crossing in 2002 — a GameCube game released worldwide.

A game developer who goes by the handle TV online accessed the already leaked files and posted about his findings on Twitter this week. TV extracted a bunch of Dōbutsu no Mori character models and converted them into “something viewable,” he said. All the models he’s extracted so far are uploaded to his website; Animal Crossing: New Horizons fans will likely recognize plenty of them.

Among the files, TV found an unused villager, called Cat13, who appears to have never made it to an Animal Crossing game. We don’t know much about her yet — just that she looks grumpy. But as data miners continue to look through the Dōbutsu no Mori files, they could find more references to her.

For a better look, TV put Cat13’s model into Dōbutsu no Mori e+, according to Kotaku.

Cat13, nicknamed Catty by TV, joins Chestnut in the list of cut characters in Dōbutsu no Mori. Chestnut was found in game files a while ago, but people have speculated that she was never intended as a villager. Instead, data miners believe she’s actually a traveling character, like Redd or Leif.

With the Gigaleak, there’s potential that Animal Crossing fans will get some answers about Chestnut, too — depending on what else is found as players dig into huge leak.