All day I have been wondering whether or not I should dedicate an article to Brian Cooper, also known as BriBri. Brian was the guy behind JapaneseNintendo, passionate Toad fan and avid Pocket Camp player. We heard about his leaving this world yesterday, when Karim, his administrator for the Twitter account, got word from Brian’s family through a friend.
Sadly I have bad news about Brian. pic.twitter.com/DqnAgy7jN9
— Toad (@toadforsmash) January 6, 2021
Our contact had been getting less this past year. Although Japanese Nintendo was still very much his baby, it was taking over his entire life so when he announced to step back to focus on his Toad site it was a surprise. Contacting him later on netted no response anymore, so I was thinking he must be focussing on other things. It’s horrible to think that he really left it all behind in the literal sense.
I decided to look back to our conversations in email and on Twitter, and saw to my surprise that we’d been talking since 2014. And re-reading it made up my mind: yes, I am indeed making an article, remembering Brian.
Supportive, helpful, passionate and encouraging
Those are the words that describe Brian for me. He was the first that reached out to me when I had been blogging for a couple of months, asking whether I’d like to do a guest post for Japanese Nintendo. And as he lacked time to play and review games himself, he asked whether I’d do the occasional review for him. Even going as far as to send me Japanese game cartridges through mail, I played and reviewed them for his site, and then me sending them back!
JapaneseNintendo did well, forming a true gem of information about upcoming games that hit Japan first and my own LadiesGamers progressed too. He labeled us a Sister Site, which was fun! It’s not like we chatted daily or even weekly, but I could always ask him for advice and our love for mutual games kept us connected anyway.
We both enjoyed Tomodachi Life, Animal Crossing and let’s not forget, MiiTomo!
Memories of Animal Crossing
I asked him at one time to share his favourite memories of this lovely game on the site. And to show the importance of Animal Crossing to him by this quote:
Perhaps the most important role that Animal Crossing has played in my life isn’t anything directly in-game related, but in that it has twice propelled me to start blog-writing. The first was a total commercial failure, but saw me write a daily online diary from the perspective of my villager in Wild World, the second you may know as Japanese Nintendo.
You can find the entire Animal Crossing Memories article by BriBri here.
We live in a world that has gotten so small (in a way) due to the internet. We all “know” people that we actually don’t know in real life, but they feel like friends anyway. I didn’t really know him in person of course, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
Brian told me one time that he was still keeping up with Pocket Camp, every three hours, every day. His campsite is still there, at level 235, but he won’t check in anymore…