The Pikmin Franchise Came Together Because Of Shigeru Miyamoto

gameranx.com:

In the latest installment of Nintendo’s “Ask The Developer” interview series, the original Pikmin team talked about how the franchise originally came together, thanks to Shigeru Miyamoto.

Now, it should be clear that Shigeru Miyamoto never made games alone. Even as far back as the first Super Mario Brothers on the NES, or Donkey Kong for the arcades, other people were working on aspects such as programming, music, and art, and their ideas often superseded Miyamoto’s.

The common trope that Miyamoto was an auteur in the same way that Hideo Kojima is an auteur in his works like the Metal Gear series or Tokimeki Memorial was possibly never true.

Not all game designers are auteurs. Miyamoto’s job was not necessarily to express his singular voice in a game, but to make a game project come together, with a game idea to lead on. It wasn’t always his idea first, but it was often pivotal when Miyamoto would decide which way they were going to go.

Miyamoto was joined in this interview by Shigefumi Hino and Masamuchi Abe, both directors at this point, as well as Yuji Kando and Junji Morii, who were new hires at the company.

The staff were drawing from a variety of influences when they were designing the first Pikmin game. Among the works they cited were Tim Burton’s oevre before the 2000s, the Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene, and the violent 1973 French animated film  La Planète Sauvage, known in English as Fantastic Planet.

Now, don’t get too excited about these references. Miyamoto stated that he hasn’t actually gotten to read The Selfish Gene, while Shigefumi Hino, the person who did read it, admits he didn’t really understand it.

But what they were going for was a game with a mysterious vibe, and mechanics around