Pikmin 3 Was Not Initially Destined for the Wii U

Pikmin 3 was one of the stars of the Wii U presentation at the E3 2012 trade show, but Shigeru Miyamoto, the leading developer on the Pikmin franchise, says that his team explored a number of other options before settling on the current incarnation.

The veteran developer has told IGN that, “We had a bit of a discussion internally about which direction we should go for Pikmin 3. And at the same time we were also trying out different experiments on the DS and the 3DS and the Wii to see which platform the game would work best on.”

It seems that the Pikmin team invested a lot of work on the game on the Nintendo Wii and then took most of the concepts and simply ported them to the new Wii U, while adding mechanics that use the touch screen and the better motion tracking.

Pikmin 3 will be offered during the Wii U launch window.