 With Pikmin 3 arriving on the Nintendo Switch, fans of the series have just one question they want answered. Where is Pikmin 4? First announced in 2015, and occasionally mentioned in interviews in the years that have followed, Pikmin 4 always seems to be just barely out of reach. It's not unreasonable to wonder whether the game is even in development at all anymore. With video games, it's normally wrong to attribute a game's success or failure to a single developer. In the case of Pikmin 4 though, there's only really one person who is willing to talk about the project, Shigeru Miyamoto. The timeline of Miyamoto's comments about Pikmin 4 has already been documented by other, better YouTubers, so we're just going to highlight his most relevant statements. In discussing the game, Miyamoto has made it clear that not everyone at Nintendo shares his enthusiasm for Pikmin 4. In 2015, when asked about a new Pikmin game, Miyamoto said, Pikmin teams are always working on the next one. When asked for clarification, a representative from Nintendo sheepishly admitted, we can confirm that Pikmin 4 is in development, but that is all we can confirm at present. This was clearly a game that Nintendo didn't yet want to discuss further. About a year later, Miyamoto spoke about Pikmin 4 again, saying, Yes, you were right, and we're working on Pikmin 4. So, you know, when we're in development we have to create a list of priorities, and it has been kind of hard to fit that onto that list, but we're hopefully starting to see that on the list now. Then, another year later, he admitted, I've been told not to share anything about this from PR, but I can tell you it is progressing. It's clear from these quotes that while Nintendo has been working on Pikmin 4, it's not been their top priority. Miyamoto is pushing for the game, but he's been so over-enthusiastic that he's been warned to stop teasing fans during interviews. It would make sense that, having such strong affection for the series, Miyamoto would be the driving force behind a new Pikmin game. If he were able to devote himself fully to it, Nintendo would likely allocate more resources to getting Pikmin 4 made in a timely manner. So what then is absorbing all of Shigeru Miyamoto's time? What's keeping him from pushing for Pikmin 4? Well, while this might not be the only other project on Miyamoto's plate, we do know that there's one big thing that the veteran developer has been busy with, building his own Disneyland. Miyamoto has been one of the chief points of liaison between Nintendo and Universal, as the two companies have worked to build Super Nintendo World, a theme park in Tokyo. This, it seems, is Miyamoto's big dream for Nintendo, for the company to, quote, challenge Disney. This is a big undertaking, and it makes sense that he has less time to badger his colleagues about speeding up Pikmin 4's development. Perhaps then, once work on Super Nintendo World has progressed a little further, Miyamoto will turn his sights to Pikmin 4. Perhaps, alternatively, someone else at Nintendo will develop a burning desire to work on the game. At the moment though, this project has furthered down Nintendo's list of priorities than many Pikmin fans would like. Now, there is actually one other explanation for what happened to Pikmin 4. It's possible that the game has suffered the same fate as the notorious Mario 128. Once upon a time, as fans eagerly awaited a sequel to Mario 64, Nintendo showed off a tech demo entitled Mario 128, which had, as the name suggests, 128 tiny marios running around on the top of a game board. For years afterwards, fans asked Miyamoto over and over again about the game. He finally stated, 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 that all this is what happened to Mario 128, you'd all be pretty angry. So who knows? Perhaps Pikmin 4 has gone the way of Mario 128, with its early development work being absorbed into a completely different Nintendo game. Perhaps there is no Pikmin 4 at all anymore. Either way, we'll have to wait and see. Perhaps the moral of this story is that you can't always take Shigeru Miyamoto's comments at face value.