Did You Know Nintendo Made A New Sub-Species of Flower To Promote Pikmin 1

Pikmin 4 will be launching soon so here’s a cute little fact about Olimar’s flowery friends: did you know that the flower that sprouts on the top of the Pikmin’s heads is a real flower and that Nintendo created said flower to promote the first game?

The Bacopa Cabana is a sub-species of the Chaenostoma Cordatum, one of the 52 species in the genus Chaenostoma native to South Africa. It is also known as The Pikmin Flower.

The Flower was specifically bred into existence as part of a collaboration between Nintendo of America and agriculture science and technology provider Syngenta AG in 2001 as part of a marketing campaign for the first Pikmin. The flower consists of five white petals and a yellow center which is the exact same flower that grows on the Pikmin’s heads when they mature from drinking enough nectar, allowing them to run faster.

In a press release written at the time, then Executive Vice President, of Sales and Marketing at Nintendo of America Peter Main said that the Pikmin Flower marketing initiative “demonstrates that at the core of Nintendo is creativity”.

“We used a variety of innovative and unusual activities to build anticipation for the Nintendo GameCube. Naming a flower after a video game is just one more way Nintendo is ‘seeding’ creative marketing”.

The seeds for the Becopa Cabana flower were later released for the public to purchase in April 2002 and remain available to this day meaning that you can grow them yourselves if you want.

The original Pikmin would release in 2001 for the Nintendo Gamecube and go on to sell over 50,000 copies in Japan and an estimated 1 million copies worldwide. It’s not Mario or Zelda sales but it’s a pretty solid achievement for a then brand new IP, cementing Olimar and his flowered friends among Nintendo’s All-Stars to this day.

Whether creating a new flower had anything to do with that success is unknown but it’s always interesting to see the unique and different ways marketing teams try to promote their latest products and I won’t lie, the idea of growing little Pikmin flowers in my backyard does sound like it’d be pretty fun.

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