Miyamoto on a Mission to Include Pikmin in Every Nintendo Product

Six seconds into the teaser for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, three small creatures waddle across the screen alongside Mario, Toad, and Peach: a red Pikmin, a yellow Pikmin, a blue Pikmin. It is a blink-and-miss-it moment. For Nintendo representative director and producer Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Pikmin, Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong, it was entirely deliberate.

When IGN asked whether he had requested the cameo, Miyamoto corrected the framing. "Now I wouldn't say a request," he said. "More like a mission. I'm on a mission to try to include Pikmin in any kind of Nintendo product we put up."

That statement is less a charming aside from a beloved game designer than a signal of deliberate internal alignment. For a company where IP stewardship is managed with near-surgical discipline, the word "mission" carries institutional weight.

The strategy rests on what Miyamoto described as an "unwritten rule" at Nintendo, one in effect for roughly 20 years. "In Nintendo there's sort of like an unwritten rule," he explained. "Mario needs to stay in the Mario universe, or Splatoon needs to stay in Splatoon, and we don't use different characters in the same place. But Pikmin has this kind of unwritten rule where they're okay to appear with other characters." The practical implication is significant: Pikmin are Nintendo's only IP cleared for cross-brand deployment, an internal exception that makes them uniquely portable across every product line in the company's portfolio.

That exception is already being exercised well beyond game releases. Pikmin characters appear at Super Nintendo World theme park areas, where Mario and Link cannot venture outside their own dedicated zones. In October, Nintendo published a short video showing Pikmin moving items around a child's nursery, deliberately removed from any gaming context. Pikmin also appear in the trailer for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

Miyamoto said he has spent "the past five or six years" actively working to grow the Pikmin brand, with Pikmin Bloom, the location-based mobile game co-developed with Niantic, as a central pillar of that push. Niantic's track record with Pokémon GO demonstrated the consumer footprint franchise IP can achieve when moved into daily life, and Miyamoto has been steering Pikmin toward a similar presence.

The franchise turns 25 this year. Its four mainline entries, Pikmin (2001), Pikmin 2 (2004), Pikmin 3 (2013), and Pikmin 4 (July 21, 2023), have collectively sold over 13 million copies worldwide. Pikmin 4 alone moved 3.33 million units, 1.82 million in Japan and 1.51 million internationally, surpassing the lifetime sales of every earlier entry in the series.

Miyamoto's filmmaking interest in Pikmin stretches back more than a decade. In 2014, during the commercially difficult Wii U era, he produced the Pikmin Short Movies, an animated series made to promote Pikmin 3 that earned enduring fan affection. A Pikmin statue appeared as an Easter egg in the 2023 blockbuster The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and the upcoming Galaxy Movie marks the franchise's first appearance in a full Nintendo theatrical release.

Given the cross-IP clearance, the realistic next appearances form a clear pattern: Nintendo Switch 2 system-level UI and menus (Pikmin's neutrality makes them natural interface mascots), additional theatrical releases under the Nintendo-Illumination pipeline, deeper Super Nintendo World integrations in markets where new areas are under construction, real-world Pikmin Bloom tie-ins to Nintendo events, and standalone merchandise that needs no new game launch to justify production. Miyamoto described Nintendo as "like a talent agency" with "a lot of talented characters." Pikmin, it turns out, are the only ones with a standing all-access pass.