The Story of Pikmin - Documentary

Our story begins at Nintendo Space World 2000. At this event, Super Mario 128 is presented to the public as a tech demo meant to showcase the power of Nintendo’s upcoming home console at the time, The Nintendo GameCube. This particular tech demo inspired many future games such as the sphere walking seen in Mario Galaxy or the physics of Metroid Prime. However, for Pikmin, it was the idea of having a large number of characters on screen acting independently of each other. Shigeru Miyamoto would take this concept and try to apply it to a full-scale game. During the Game Developers Conference of 2007, Miyamoto, alongside director, “Shigefumi Hino”, explained that the original concept of Pikmin was a game about two people “Adam” and “Eve”. The idea was to have the player observe Adam and Eve as they lived their lives in a prehistoric world. Acting as a sort of God, the player could make them create a family, or make them fight. If Adam and Eve created a family, the player could use their many offsprings to fight against prehistoric animals like mammoths. The feature of grabbing these little offsprings and throwing them was added in to make the game more intractable. Due to their vision of animating and controlling hundreds of these creatures, the designs of Adam and Eve were simplified into the form of the Pikmin we see today. The team also decided to add the player into the game world, even though they were at first meant to just be an observer. Despite all of this, the team’s vision for the game wasn’t yet super clear, it was only after seeing the Pikmins in action that things seemed to click, Hino explains: I still can clearly recall the first time that I saw multiple Pikmin working together to carry a big opponent. Until then, we had been struggling to find the direction that this game should have, but when these "carry" actions were completed, we were able to determine the future of Pikmin.