This week will be fun for Nintendo fans, as we’re days away from the release of Pikmin 4. Despite it being a decade or so in the making, fans are excited to get their hands on it. Based on early sales numbers, it’s doing pretty well pre-launch, and many people will likely get the game on launch day in either physical or digital format. But before then, Nintendo has once again decided to do a special interview with the dev team and ask questions about the games they worked on. In this case, they brought together Shigeru Miyamoto and others to discuss the franchise’s true origins.
For example, while Shigeru Miyamoto is credited with the game’s creation, it wasn’t just him who brought it to life. Shigefumi Hino was one of the directors for the first game, and he worked with Masamichi Abe to come up with ideas to utilize Nintendo’s newest system at the time to make something special. But it wasn’t the Gamecube that they thought up things for, it was the N64. Another key difference was that it was more of an action game originally:
“Back then, we envisioned a game that would control a lot of characters with AI. The game we had in mind included creatures with AI chips in their heads to make them think a certain way, and you would control them by swapping their chips. So, players would control them by assigning “thought chips,” such as “combat,” “heal,” or “help friends,” to each of them. As they explored the map and gained more experience, their chip capacity would increase. In other words, they’d become smarter.”
So yeah, totally different from what we have now, and it didn’t end there. Originally, the game would be a top-down perspective, and the “creatures” of the game would be both male and female and had designs to help you tell them apart based on what was on their heads. Eventually, the concept art started to turn into what we recognize today.
One of the team was even inspired by Tim Burton and his projects, as they had an “eeriness” to them yet had “emotional weight,” and they wanted that for the title. Ironically, this kind of design led Miyamoto to be really invested in the project.
Eventually, the project shifted over to the Nintendo Gamecube, and Pikmin was a hit for the system, and now we’re days away from its 4th console entry. Oh, how time flies.
