What inspired Pikmin?
The famous answer is Shigeru Miyamoto's own, given in Nintendo's Ask the Developer interviews for Pikmin 4: “Simply put, the idea was something that I came up with while observing ants in my garden... But the reality was a bit more complicated.” The complication is the rest of this page, and almost all of it comes from the people who made the game, in their own words.
What Miyamoto had actually been carrying for years was not a character but a kind of game: a management game. He describes old PC simulations where you chose whether to eat grains of rice or plant them to grow more, and the satisfaction of a workplace manager deciding who should be given what task. Pikmin's word for that flow is dandori: planning the work so the work goes smoothly.
The ants arrived inside a prototype that already existed. Directors Shigefumi Hino and Masamichi Abe had been building a game about controlling a crowd of small creatures since the Super NES to Nintendo 64 transition, an early version where the creatures thought through swappable AI chips, thought chips and emotion chips. Then came the moment Miyamoto still tells on himself: the creatures defeated an enemy and carried it home, and “they looked just like ants carrying a cicada. Once again, a big hit with everyone.” His other famous contribution was a question. Watching the team throw creatures at enemies, he asked: can they stick?
THE LOOK
Cute was never the briefTHE NAME
A counting word, misheardDuring development the team counted the creatures aloud in Japanese, ippiki, the counter word for one small animal. Programmer Colin Reed heard the counting and mistook “piki” for their name. Piki became Picky, and when the official name was settled, Abe says, Pikmin won because it sounded a bit like “pick me.” Miyamoto's own review: “It kind of sounded like 'vitamin' too, so we thought it was good.”
THE TWO COVERS
One garden, two boxes
WHAT HAPPENED
Three months, or he walkedThe scattered ideas became a game when Miyamoto asked to join as a director on one condition, in his words: “I'll join as a director, so please give me three months. I'll step down if it fails.” He compressed the entire game into a single flow diagram, a sheet that declared nothing would happen in the game that was not written on it, and then hand-carried the announcement trailer, edited to the last minute, onto the plane to E3 2001.
Nintendo's own short version survives as a footnote in Iwata Asks: “Mr. Miyamoto watching ants while he was gardening inspired the game's development.” Both things are true. The ants were the spark; the management game, the Burton eeriness, the surreal French film and the Dawkins were the fuel the team had already stacked around it.