 The next Mario is Pikmin. These are the words of Shigeru Miyamoto. During the development of the first Pikmin for the Nintendo GameCube, Miyamoto was certain that the game would be the next big thing for Nintendo, the template by which the company would rescue itself from a life-threatening situation. Nintendo's market share was dwindling. Sony's PlayStation had far outsold the Nintendo 64, and as Microsoft looked set to enter the home console market as well, Nintendo needed to change their strategy if they wanted to survive against two rivals with such deep pockets. Nintendo couldn't compete on graphical fidelity. The company needed a new way to stand out. With the benefit of hindsight, as Pikmin 4 finally launches over 20 years after the first game debuted, it's clear that the franchise is hardly a media juggernaut in the same league as Mario. Nevertheless, Pikmin set the stage for many of Nintendo's successes in the years since its release, with the company's focus on innovative gameplay and simple yet deep game design rather than chasing the latest graphical trend. What's more, Pikmin became Miyamoto's first experimentation with filmmaking. Pikmin's short films walked so the Super Mario Bros. movie could run. This is the story of how Pikmin dramatically changed Nintendo in directly saving the company from irrelevance. This is why Pikmin matters. Attendees at the Spaceworld 2000 Expo saw perhaps the most exciting and misleading Nintendo presentation of all time. On paper, Nintendo's presence at the Expo did its job perfectly by drumming up support and media coverage for the upcoming Nintendo GameCube. Much of this attention would ultimately backfire though when the games that released for the GameCube didn't actually match what Nintendo had shown off. The most famous example is The Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker, a cartoonish, cell-shaded game which received a lot of negative press at the time of its release because of its art style. A tech demo shown at Spaceworld 2000 had featured a more realistic Lincoln Ganondorf doing battle and fans were unimpressed with the brighter, cuter game that ultimately released. Fans had assumed that the demos shown off at Spaceworld were representative of actual games that Nintendo was making. But the presentation merely showed ideas that had yet to crystallise into their final forms. Case in point, Mario 128, a game which Shiguro Miyamoto had been talking about to journalists since not long after the release of Mario 64. The demo showed off over 100 small Mario's running around in a single environment, an impressive feat that wouldn't have been possible on the Nintendo 64. Miyamoto had in his head the idea of a game about directing hundreds of characters. At a time when Nintendo's rivals were focusing on ever more realistic graphics, Miyamoto instead wanted to use the new console's greater processing power to display more characters on screen. Where Sony was focusing on quality, Miyamoto saw an opportunity to increase quantity and complexity. When elements from Mario 128 finally released, most people didn't even notice them. Miyamoto later clarified, the one question I'm always asked is, what happened to Mario 128? The purpose of that demo was to show how the new technology in the GameCube could dynamically change the nature of Mario games. So when people ask me what happened to it, I'm always at a loss as to how to answer it, because most of you have already played it, but you played it in a game called Pikmin. This game featured one element of Mario 128 that allowed a large number of characters to operate independently and as a group. It's advanced AI. But of course, if I was to tell you all that this is what happened to Mario 128, you'd all be pretty angry. Had Pikmin released as Mario 128, it almost certainly would have sold better. The GameCube might have sold better at launch too. Because of the decision to strip away the Mario branding and create the new Pikmin IP, the GameCube launched without a Mario title. Luigi picked up the slack instead, but this didn't have the desired effect for sales. Creating Pikmin was important for Miyamoto though. This new franchise reflected a change in him, and in the way he viewed the world. As he got older, he began to see things differently, and the chance to present the natural world from the viewpoint of tiny, fragile, very mortal animals was something he just couldn't pass up. Everything changed for Miyamoto when he reached his 40th birthday. Facing down middle age, he committed to living more healthily. He quit his two big vices, smoking and pachinko. In their place, he decided to exercise more by taking up swimming. What's more, he decided to surround himself with the natural world by spending more time in his garden. It was here, as he contemplated the world around him, that Miyamoto had the idea for a new game that would define the next era of his life. He watched a line of ants working together, and decided that this was it. He wanted to make a game about tiny creatures who work as a team. He later said, Ants, as you know, always have a leader, and tend to be carrying things, and as they move, they create a kind of rail. And I started thinking about a game with lots of small people carrying things in a line, following a leader, with everyone going in the same direction. When we think about video games, we always have the idea of a start and a goal, and it's like a race between individual players, who can make it and who won't. And I thought, why does it have to be a competition? Why can't everyone just move together in the same direction, carrying things as a team? Who made these rules in the first place anyway? Pikmin was a rejection of the gaming trend of the moment. Shooting games were becoming more prevalent than ever before. Before long, games like Halo would come to dominate the console gaming conversation. Miyamoto's desire for a friendlier game about cute little ant-like creatures stood in direct contrast to this. Pikmin wasn't just intended for entertainment, though. Miyamoto wanted to create a game that taught something, about life, about caring for others, and about facing death and moving on from tragedy. In 2014, Miyamoto, along with four assistants, met with members of the press in the luxurious Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Tokyo. The occasion? The premiere of three short films, all about Pikmin, in a move which would pave the way for the Super Mario Brothers movie and one of the highest-grossing animated films in history. In an interview at the screening, Miyamoto explained exactly why Pikmin matters so much to him. He said, In Pikmin, the characters die but they're reborn, or new life appears in their place. And this is how nature is. I thought trying to teach children that there's always an end to life, but a new beginning will follow shortly was worthwhile. When working on the first Pikmin, back when the GameCube was still in development, Miyamoto had been pondering the role of narrative in games. Nintendo's main rival, Sony, had been releasing more cinematic games, aided by their choice of using compact discs over cartridges, with lengthy cutscenes to tell more complex stories to give context to gameplay. Should Nintendo do the same thing? No. Miyamoto decided that he didn't want his games to borrow from the conventions of cinema. Should his games be more artistic, though? Maybe. According to Motoe Okamoto, who worked on the first Pikmin, Miyamoto has long been interested in interactive play and creation tools, not just pure video games. When game consoles like PlayStation and Nintendo 64 introduced 3D visuals, he considered that perhaps these consoles could also introduce fun interactive art that players could continue to touch and play without a clear goal or creative tools. Pikmin then was Miyamoto's answer to the more cinematic games of the early 2000s. His work would not borrow from cinema as his competitors were doing, but would instead use the GameCube's greater power to create games brimming with interactive emotion. The world of tiny animals, though, was only the surface expression of Nintendo's idea. Deep down, the game was fundamentally an expression of the same game design philosophy that the company had perfected years ago, all the way back before the existence of Nintendo home consoles. The idea for Pikmin didn't come first. Long before the game settled on a story of tiny creatures, Miyamoto wanted to use the then-indevelopment console to render hundreds of characters for the player to control at once. This was the basis for the Mario 128 demo at Spaceworld, although the developer's first approach was a game called Adam and Eve, a god simulator, not unlike the then-popular titles like Black and White. Said Miyamoto, in the beginning, the idea was only to watch their lives. I thought that, in the point of view of the producer, this was an interesting idea. Watch their life was the theme. To give them love or make them fight. Pretend to be God. Depending on the decisions of the player, they could build a nest and have children. When we were developing this idea, we reached an impasse. What were the objectives? To find a gameplay challenge for his new title, Miyamoto went right back to the basics, drawing on lessons he learned at the foot of his mentor, Gunpei Yokoi. In one interview, he said, The thing about Pikmin is the style of play is actually sort of like cooking. If you think of cooking, cooking is a process and in that process you're simultaneously doing different things. You're working on this set of ingredients while you're cooking that and then over there you've got to start preparing the next thing. So it's a matter of managing these different processes together. The gameplay in Pikmin is very much like that. This is far from the first Nintendo game to use this kind of gameplay. Many of the company's earliest titles are built on the idea of multitasking to complete several relatively simple objectives at once. This was the design philosophy proposed by Gunpei Yokoi, Miyamoto's mentor and creator of the Game and Watch series of handheld games. With limited graphics and only a few fixed visuals to cycle between, Yokoi came up with a way to make tremendously basic gameplay endlessly addictive. Miyamoto once explained the lessons taught to him by Yokoi, saying, Let's say for example that there's one action in the game that the player can perform easily. Then let's add another simple action. These actions may be simple in themselves, but when the player is required to do them both at the same time, it becomes a whole lot more tricky. This philosophy was at the heart of what Miyamoto wanted to achieve with the GameCube. Pikmin then was an attempt to take Nintendo's core game design philosophy and expand it endlessly, creating something soulful, thoughtful, and artistic. But Pikmin wasn't actually Miyamoto's idea. At the tail end of the Super Nintendo's lifespan, Nintendo began preparing for their next console. The Nintendo 64 was to have then unprecedented computing power, and two developers, Shigefumi Hino and Masamichi Abe, wanted to see how far it could be stretched. The pair were trying to come up with a game in which the player controlled a group of AI characters. Along with junior programmer Yuji Kando, they experimented with ideas around giving these characters different moves based on computer chips in their heads. While the Nintendo 64 was a lot more powerful than the Super Nintendo, animating a large number of 3D characters simply wouldn't have been possible, so the team planned to use 2D characters instead. Things simply didn't click with this project. A year after Kando joined the project, an artist, Junji Mori, was brought in. At this point the game's creatures, called Pikki, had yet to develop their signature look. It was Mori who, inspired by Tim Burton and the French animation La Planète Sauvage, came up with a wiry bug-eyed Pikmin design that the team fell in love with. While the design of the world was universally popular among the team, the limitations of the Nintendo 64 made the project unfeasible in this hardware, and the developers really weren't certain how to turn what they created into an actual game. Said Hino, although the character and world design, as well as actions like stick, throw and carry, had been decided, it took us a while to finalise the gameplay loop. There were various elements floating around and we couldn't quite fit them together and figure out exactly what the characters should do and what would constitute completing the game. Thus the project languished through the entire life cycle of the Nintendo 64. Until gearing up for the GameCube, Miyamoto decided to push the team's prototype to become the game he had in his head. Miyamoto's plan was ambitious. He wanted to show off Pikmin at the 2001 E3, a year after his Mario 128 presentation at Spaceworld. This meant taking a prototype that had been in stuttered early development and turning it into a working game in just a few short months. It was clear that this would only be possible if Miyamoto took the helm himself. He later said, 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. Miyamoto went through everything the game's designers had put together thus far. A lot of world building, but very little actual gameplay. He organised these ideas into a flowchart diagram that showed how their disparate components could work together and, crucially, give each level a satisfying objective for players to achieve. Said Kondo, only after seeing this diagram was I finally convinced that it would work as a game. Just two months after Miyamoto made the diagram, Pikmin was revealed at E3. Right up until the last minute, Miyamoto kept making changes to the presentation, asking for tweaks to the game's trailer. While Miyamoto announced the game as if Pikmin was ready to play, behind the scenes the team knew otherwise. They had created just a single level at that point, specifically for E3, while the rest of the game had yet to be finalised. Miyamoto, though, was unconcerned. He had faith in Pikmin. He said, in my defence, I made the announcement because I believed we could pull it off. I was confident that we'd finish the game. The first Pikmin game didn't meet Miyamoto's expectations. From a design perspective, it hadn't been possible to get more than a few dozen Pikmin working in a game level at once. Miyamoto had hoped for far more. From a sales perspective, Pikmin was far from the groundbreaking new IP that Nintendo had hoped for. The game won a dedicated cult following, but Miyamoto was determined to try again, again and again. Now, after a decade of promising Pikmin 4, Nintendo has finally released the long-awaited game. Meanwhile, the mobile game Pikmin Bloom has brought the series to mobile, making it accessible to the world's smartphone users. More broadly, the lessons learned from the Pikmin franchise have helped Nintendo to carve out a niche in the modern era of gaming, as the company aims not to compete with rivals, but rather to use the technology available to create innovative experimental games that don't follow an established formula. While Pikmin may not have the clout of some of Miyamoto's other creations, it certainly achieved its goal of transforming Nintendo. Said Motoi Okamoto, I understand what Miyamoto meant when he said the next Mario was Pikmin. Pikmin was his launch title for GameCube, and is now seen as one of his masterpieces. He'd created a great game with Mario, and was trying to again create the next big thing in games. The moral of the story is that the world is more interesting and varied when we work together, but don't all follow the same path along the way.