In the latest installment of Nintendo’s “Ask The Developer” interview series, the original Pikmin team talked about how the franchise originally came together, thanks to Shigeru Miyamoto.
Now, it should be clear that Shigeru Miyamoto never made games alone. Even as far back as the first Super Mario Brothers on the NES, or Donkey Kong for the arcades, other people were working on aspects such as programming, music, and art, and their ideas often superseded Miyamoto’s.
The common trope that Miyamoto was an auteur in the same way that Hideo Kojima is an auteur in his works like the Metal Gear series or Tokimeki Memorial was possibly never true.
Not all game designers are auteurs. Miyamoto’s job was not necessarily to express his singular voice in a game, but to make a game project come together, with a game idea to lead on. It wasn’t always his idea first, but it was often pivotal when Miyamoto would decide which way they were going to go.
Miyamoto was joined in this interview by Shigefumi Hino and Masamuchi Abe, both directors at this point, as well as Yuji Kando and Junji Morii, who were new hires at the company.
The staff were drawing from a variety of influences when they were designing the first Pikmin game. Among the works they cited were Tim Burton’s oevre before the 2000s, the Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene, and the violent 1973 French animated film La Planète Sauvage, known in English as Fantastic Planet.
Now, don’t get too excited about these references. Miyamoto stated that he hasn’t actually gotten to read The Selfish Gene, while Shigefumi Hino, the person who did read it, admits he didn’t really understand it.
But what they were going for was a game with a mysterious vibe, and mechanics around controlling a group of characters. They came up with ideas like throwing the Pikmin at an enemy to make them attack, and getting to carry the enemy home if it died. They even though of how to show a Pikmin dying if the enemy ate it!
But at a certain point, their disparate ideas weren’t quite coalescing. Miyamoto had also been working on the Mario 128 demo without the Pikmin team’s knowledge, but at this point, he decided to take charge.
This was what Miyamoto and Kando said happened:
“Miyamoto: So, as the producer of the game, I pleaded to Abe-san, “I’ll join as a director, so please give me three months. I’ll step down if it fails.” (Laughs)
Kando: That’s when Miyamoto-san put together all of our scattered ideas―hardly leaving any behind―into a single game flow diagram.”
Miyamoto then came up with the underlying game structure for Pikmin. Pikmin isn’t about taking characters from point A to point B, say, like Lemmings. Pikmin instead is about getting enough Pikmin to carry objects.
Miyamoto decided that it wouldn’t be great to order players to bring a certain number of Pikmin. However, if certain objects required a set number of Pikmin to carry, it would be easier to intuit.
Miyamoto basically dropped his job as general manager of the project, to be directly involved in Pikmin’s development. That freed him up to add the skeleton of how Pikmin’s world worked, in terms of ecology, as well as how that ecology revolved around a seemingly abandoned human world.
With all that work put in, Miyamoto and his peers knew that they made a fun game in Pikmin, but he has always been confused about why it isn’t more popular. You can read more about that here.
Pikmin 4 will be releasing tomorrow, July 21, 2023, exclusively on the Nintendo Switch. The first three Pikmin games are also available now on the console.
