I’m gonna test this out and I wonder if you ever heard about it!
Only in Japan, there was an updated version of their GameCube Animal Forest called “Dōbutsu no Mori e+” which had a system that allowed you to bring villagers to your town through the use of e-Reader cards.
This system was so flexible, that a rom hacker/speedrunner managed to make a standalone program that allows you to create custom e-Reader data and transfer it to this specific version of Animal Forest. That means, it’s actually possible to bring Socky to Animal Forest!
Info found here at 14:35:
https://youtu.be/ylNg4mTzxEU
Now I’m doing some further investigation on how it’s done.