Monkeys have appeared in every game in the Animal Crossing series, but are first introduced as villagers in Animal Crossing: Wild World. In Wild World, the monkey villagers could only be obtained by using Tag Mode near a Nintendo DS Download Station during specific distribution periods. As the distributions have ended, they can no longer move into a Wild World town without the use of cheating devices or save editing.
Monkey villagers are more readily available in Animal Crossing: City Folk and Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and function no differently to other villager species. Nine monkey villagers have appeared in the series so far, and one special character.