Nintendo got “a lot of angry calls” from parents over Animal Crossing’s “wiggling penis” statue

Animal Crossing‘s cutest lawn ornament reportedly triggered a wave of panicked calls to Nintendo from parents convinced something obscene was hiding in it.

Considering the wholesome reputation Animal Crossing enjoys today, from its recent Baskin-Robbins ice cream collab to another round of cozy island updates, it is bizarre to picture Nintendo’s support line flooded with complaints about a supposedly phallic garden fixture. But according to a former Nintendo Game Counselor, that exact call came in more often than anyone would guess.

Why Animal Crossing’s garden gyroid caused so many angry calls to Nintendo

As first spotted by video game historian Sasha’s Retrobytes, an old issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly resurfaced online. It featured former Nintendo Game Counselor Rick Sandbom, who worked the phones back when New Horizons’ predecessors sat on shelves.

Among everything he fielded, one complaint stuck to him the most: “We got a lot of angry calls about Animal Crossing,” Sandbom said. The gyroid stationed outside each player’s house, he explained, kept getting mistaken for a “wiggling penis.”

The calls came in so often that Nintendo apparently built an internal script just to handle them. Sandbom said he waited every day for the chance to take that call himself, but it always got routed to more experienced staff first.

The irony is that gyroids are actually modeled after haniwa, the funerary clay figures buried alongside the dead during Japan’s Kofun period. Somewhere between an ancient burial ritual and a blurry CRT screen, an entire generation of parents saw something Nintendo never intended.

Nintendo has clearly gotten more comfortable discussing awkward Animal Crossing content since then. This year, the company shut down a player-made adult-themed island that had operated in plain sight for five years, proof that even a game built on cheeky garden statues has its limits.