Cabbage

Cabbage was announced in 1997 as a game in which the player was able to raise, feed, and carry around a creature called a Cabbage. Shigeru Miyamoto stated at the time that the game had been in development for five years. Cabbage had been the working title of the game, though it appeared to be "strangely popular" with the staff. It was something Itoi "randomly blurted out" at some point during development, but he was fine with sticking to it, as there weren't any other names on the board. Kotaku noted the odd name, describing it as "sound[ing] like something a kid would normally avoid".

The game would make use of the 64DD's internal real-time clock, a hardware feature then unique to video game consoles, to keep the Cabbage creature and its virtual world seeming to run while the console is turned off. Furthermore, the game was supposed to allow Game Boy connectivity via the Nintendo 64 controller's Transfer Pak, to which the creature could be transferred in an interactive carrying basket game, and then released into the virtual environment of other 64DD-equipped consoles. Finally, there were plans to release expansion content on cheap 64DD floppy disks, which would alter the game and the Cabbage's development by giving it toys, "swings, slides, ponds, and so on". The team proposed the ability to use rewritable 64DD floppy disks to swap the creature's toys between different players.

Miyamoto has stated in a 2006 interview that, though Cabbage news had stopped for so long that he considered it canceled, "the conversations and design techniques that popped up when [we] were making Cabbage are, of course, connected to Nintendogs and other things that [we're] doing now." Kotaku and 1Up.com have noted that many gameplay concepts and elements in Animal Crossing had been first announced as features in Cabbage.