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 that Pikmin 4 does indeed exist and was in production, 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 the request of PR he couldn’t say any more at that time.
And that was it. That was all that was said on Pikmin 4 until the September 2022 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 (twas the best and most accessible way to play them in my opinion when it lived). 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 on July 21st exclusively for the Switch, nearly 10 years since the launch of Pikmin 3.
by Asad_Farooqui
10 Comments
Just go to the Pikmin subreddit and sort by top of all time.
Great summary! I feel like it started development right after Pikmin 3 released for Wii U, but with the Wii U doing poorly, Nintendo put it on the back burner to quickly develop bigger, higher selling games like Mario for Switch. Now that the Switch has almost all the big franchises released, the team was finally able to finish working on it.
I’m guessing development of the game is directly tied to Miyamoto’s involvement, and he was pretty busy with Super Nintendo World at Universal Japan, followed by the Super Mario Movie.
It really feels like Pikmin has his interest more than his other games though. Mario and Zelda were originally inspired by his experiences playing outside as a kid. While those two franchises have spun off from that into their own things, Pikmin feels like an attempt to recapture that feeling of exploring the world around you.
Kind of a nothing post. TLDR: there is no history, they said it existed, then kept reminding us it existed.
It’s not like they showed it in a Direct and then it took 10 years to come out. This comes down to Miyamoto having the clout at Nintendo to talk about what he’s working on or wants to work on. There’s probably all kinds of projects that get started and stopped like this but never get talked about.
This was the same thing with Pikmin 3 so it wasn’t all that surprising. Announced they were working on it years and years before it came out, people assumed it was canceled and then they dropped it on us out of nowhere. I figured it’s just a Pikmin thing at this point.
Like most posts on this topic, this ignores some important context and details. He never actually used the name Pikmin 4 when referring to the game which was “very close to completion”. The Eurogamer article you link to calls it Pikmin 4 since it was a reasonable assumption at the time, but all Miyamoto explicitly said was that a new Pikmin game was close to completion.
Nintendo later confirmed that a Pikmin 4 was in development, explicitly calling it by that name. But they never said it was the game that supposedly close to completion. Indeed, they quite deliberately walked back expectations of a looming release by saying “We can confirm that Pikmin 4 is in development *but that is all we can confirm at present*”.
The most reasonably interpretation of all of this is that Miyamoto never lied. Hey Pikmin was the game that was very close to completion, and was indeed released not long after his interview. Fans and the gaming media assumed he was referring to a mainline Pikmin game, and when questioned on the matter Nintendo confirmed one was in development. This was not the same game as Hey Pikmin, and was probably very early in development and later put aside in favor of higher-priority projects. In short, Nintendo was never sitting on a nearly-finished build of Pikmin 4 because it never existed. The only reason people are so convinced to this day that Nintendo had almost finished Pikmin 4 all the way back in 2015 was because some Eurogamer editor mistakenly wrote Pikmin 4 in the title of some article when in hindsight he was obviously talking about Hey Pikmin.
>Pikmin 1 and 2 on the Wii U Virtual Console (still the best and **most accessible** way to play them in my opinion)
Hate to break it to you, but they shut down the Wii U eShop over a month ago.
I didn’t know that the Pikmin shorts were bundled as an app. Helps explain why they suddenly appeared without direct connection to a release. Glad that they made it to YouTube too as they were fun to watch and quite polished.
This is a hot take, but I still think that Hey! Pikmin was the original Pikmin 4. Wasn’t there even an interview where someone saying Pikmin 4 completed but they just weren’t sure what platform to release it on (only the 3DS and Wii U were out at the time, Switch hadn’t been announced), and it was some months later that Hey! Pikmin was announced.