Let Animal Crossing be the background music to your life with this Chrome extension

(Image credit: Nintendo)

It won’t be long until Animal Crossing: New Horizons lands in our laps, but with this new Chrome extension, you don’t need to wait until then to vibe to peaceful tunes from the series.

A free Chrome extension called Animal Crossing Music brings the series’ real-time soundtrack to real life, letting you live like a resident of your own in-game town.

The extension takes into account data like your local time of day, day of the week, and even the weather to customize your listening experience. By default, it will play the same music at the same time as it would in-game. Currently I’m enjoying the mid-morning tunes of the original Animal Crossing while writing this from the US west coast. This weekend, I may hop online just to catch the latest K.K. Slider live performance. It’s a neat adaptation of the game’s beloved real-time gameplay mechanics. 

It also features music spanning the illustrious history of the series, including Animal Crossing, Wild World, City Folk/ Let’s Go to the City, New Leaf, and even Animal Forest, the series' Japan-only progenitor. You can randomize which game soundtracks you hear in your browser and even override its localized settings. If it’s snowing out your front door but you wish it wasn’t, tell Animal Crossing Music to play the sunny day music. Maybe your schedule is off and you want the game’s evening vibes first thing in the morning. You can do that too. The weather data requires that you give the extension your location, so keep that in mind if you’re not the type to share that info so freely.

For the most musically inclined, you can even customize your own Town Tune and have it play on the hour like the clock in the center of your quaint village. The extension is totally free and available in both Chrome Web Store and GitHub

It looks like Animal Crossing: New Horizons will have microtransactions.

Freelance Journalist

Mark Delaney is a prolific copywriter and journalist. Having contributed to publications like GamesRadar+ and Official Xbox Magazine, writing news, features, reviews, and guides, he has since turned his eye to other adventures in the industry. In 2019, Mark became OpenCritic's first in-house staff writer, and in 2021 he became the guides editor over at GameSpot.