Edit: Thanks for wholesome!
Edit 2: Silver and helpful too? Thank you, kind individuals!
This is one of those Nintendo games that we knew existed for quite a while, but nothing was actually shown of it until recently. You know it’s bad when Atlus and Square Enix can release their big budget JRPGs in a more timely manner than Miyamoto. So here’s a brief history on the existence of Pikmin 4 from its reveal to the present day.
Series creator and spokesperson Shigeru Miyamoto expressed interest in developing more Pikmin games after the release of Pikmin Short Movies for the Wii U and 3DS in 2014. Quick sidebar: in case you didn’t know, the core internal team at Nintendo responsible for Pikmin are also responsible for 2D Mario. But it wasn’t until September 7th, 2015 in an exclusive interview with [Eurogamer](https://www.eurogamer.net/pikmin-4-in-development-and-very-close-to-completion) where the big news dropped: Miyamoto would confirm the existence of Pikmin 4, even going as far to say that it was “very close to completion”. Sure Shiggy, we’ll take your word for it.
Nearly a year later on July 7th, 2016, [GameRant](https://gamerant.com/pikmin-4-update-miyamoto/) did another interview with Miyamoto inquiring about the status of the game. He replied that it’s been progressing steadily, but that it’s also been hard trying to shift priorities around to get to it. At this point people were speculating whether or not this game was still coming to Wii U or the upcoming NX, as the former was at the end of its life by this time. [Eurogamer](https://www.eurogamer.net/miyamoto-pikmin-4-still-progressing) followed up with him again at E3 2017, wherein he said once again that it’s been progressing steadily, but that per request of PR he can’t say anymore at this time.
And that was it. That was all that was said on Pikmin 4 until last week’s Nintendo Direct. In the meantime, Pikmin lived on in other Nintendo releases. We got re-releases of the Wii versions of Pikmin 1 and 2 on the Wii U Virtual Console (still the best and most accessible way to play them in my opinion). We also got a 3DS sidescrolling spinoff in the form of Hey! Pikmin, which Miyamoto thankfully assured us was not Pikmin 4. Captain Olimar (and Alph too I guess) would return as a playable character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. And most notably, we got Pikmin 3 Deluxe for the Switch and Pikmin Bloom for mobile devices. And that’s pretty much everything you need to know about the history of Pikmin 4 from its initial reveal to today. The game is scheduled to finally come out next year exclusively for the Switch.