I wouldn’t exactly call it a tragedy, but it was really touching and sad. I typically don’t find YTMND sites to be that interesting, but this one truly has been nicely done and the soundtrack they added is a true tear jerker along with the story told by comic strip panels.

Anyway, as with most things, I get obsessed with finding the source. The story itself is already touching, but if it was indeed true, it would make it feel that much more real. I noticed the comic strip text was replaced with English and and the original text was whited out. On one of the panels, there was some Korean text and that gave me an idea of where to start searching.

I found the source story: 동물의 숲과 한 북미 유저의 이야기. It is indeed a Korean site and story, but English translation was provided:

About two years ago, I bought the game Animal Crossing. It was fun for awhile, me and my brother played it for about a month, then got tired of it.

I’m always trying to convert my parents to videogames, however, and thought that Animal Crossing would be simple enough for them to get into. I let my mom set up a house, and she soon got into the game in a big way. (As a kid, she had polio, and now she had multiple sclerosis. She was largely homebound, except for the once our twice when she’d either leave to go shopping or to church.) Spending all day at home in a wheel chair bored her, so the relief Animal Crossing provided her was kind of amazing. She’d spend so much time playing it, that it became something of an obsession. She played it so much that she was constantly getting kidded by the family. She payed off her house in the game, she collected all the fossils, etc. Whenever I saw her playing, I thought that the game must have long since stopped being interesting to her, yet she kept playing- even after me and my brother had long since stopped.

Her condition got progressively worse, and she eventually stopped playing. About a year ago, she passed away.

I had forgotten about Animal Crossing, I hadn’t played it in over a year and a half. Today, however, I decided to visit the village again and see what was up. Weeds had grown everywhere, the villagers wondered where my mom and I had gone.

Then I came to my mailbox, it was full of letters with presents- all from my mom. Every letter was pretty much the same. “Thinking of you. Thought you’d like this present. Love, Mom” Even though I’d stopped playing, she continued to send me presents. I look back now at how I made fun of her for playing even after she’d done everything, and I realize now that she was probably spending her time getting presents for me.

Anyway, I know it’s probably cheesy, but I was just amazed at how much this affected me and I thought I’d share. Show your parents as much love as you can, while you still can guys.

Going through the trackbacks in the comment area, I found the original comic: 한 북미유저와 동물의 숲. Different music was used with this page, but it was equally sad. The original comic is located on thisisgame.com, but I have a backup copy here:

It appears this is from a comic called This Is Game. This particular strip is #18 and titled: 동물의 숲. According to Babelfish, that translates to: Forest of animal, probably something related to Animal Crossing.

This story turns out to be quite old. Given that the original story was posted on December 14, 2005 and the comic strip was posted on January 2, 2006, I guess someone just happened to have come by this recently and made it into a YTMND page.

If anyone can tell me what the music is, I’d really like to know.

UPDATE: Thanks to DefaultName, Vudhai, Jake, and Mike for pointing out that the music is the opening sequence from Final Fantasy X. It’s titled To Zanarkand. You can listen to the music performed by an orchestra in this video: 03 – To Zanarkand. This was apparently taken from the Tour de Japon DVD.

UPDATE #2: According to Dan, the Japanese version of Animal Crossing was called Animal Forest, and the Korean version might’ve been named the same way. According to Wikipedia, Animal Crossing in Japan is called どうぶつの森 (Doubutsu no Mori), which does indeed translate to “Animal Forest”. どうぶつ is the hiragana form of 動物.

UPDATE #3: DathVader, the owner of blog that posted the comic states the story is indeed true.