Pikmin

: This article is about the first video game in the Pikmin series of video games. For other uses, see Pikmin (disambiguation).

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Pikmin (???? in Japanese) is the first of the Pikmin series of video games which are designed by Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto (of Mario and Zelda fame). It was released December 3, 2001 in North America and June 15, 2002 in Europe. It also has the unique distinction of having been the first Player's Choice Nintendo GameCube game in North America. Its sequel is Pikmin 2. In Japanese commercials for the game, the song Ai No Uta was used, which became popular and was released as a single in its own right.

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The term "Pikmin" is derived from the South Korean word "pik-ro-man' whose closest English equivalent is 'slave'. According to an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto in the June/July 2002 issue of Nickelodeon Magazine, they are also named after his dog, Pik.

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Pikmin was a very different game than others released at the time. The game's challenge was to collect missing rocket ship parts within 30 days of preset, uniform length. The innovative system of using days to demarcate sessions of play and to develop the game's flow was very unusual at the time. Unlike many other video games at the time, Pikmin in this way put an upper limit on the time that a player could spend in one game, as at the end of 30 days, the game was over. This is similar to games in the Harvest Moon series.

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Pikmin series: Pikmin is the name of a video game series developed by Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto exclusively for the Nintendo GameCube platform. The games feature small, multi-colored creatures known as Pikmin which resemble different colored tiny people with a stalk ontop of their head from which a leaf, bud, or...

Pikmin (disambiguation): Pikmin could refer to:...

Japanese: When used as an adjective, Japanese refers to anything that originates from Japan. It may refer to more than one article:...