Nintendo Once Created A Real Pikmin Flower You Could Grow At Home
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Nintendo is no stranger to clever, and sometimes weird, marketing tactics to help promote its games and characters. In the mid-90s, for example, it even started making one-off Nintendo-branded peripherals for PC gamers. But perhaps its strangest marketing campaign of all was in 2001 when Nintendo paired with a seed company to create a new breed of flower. Not a digital plant you could cultivate in a game like "Animal Crossing," but an actual, real-life flower that consumers could buy and grow in their own homes and gardens. Named after the popular, flora-themed game, Nintendo introduced the world to the Pikmin flower.
"Pikmin" debuted in 2001 as an early GameCube title, and was conceived by Shigeru Miyamoto, who also created "Super Mario" and "The Legend of Zelda." The game is a puzzle/strategy and action platformer and involves exploring an Earth-like world with plant-like creatures called Pikmin. The game spawned several sequels and is still launching titles for the Nintendo Switch as well as iOS and Android. In the game, Pikmin are multicolored plant-animal hybrids, so naming a species of flower after them makes sense. The real-life Pikmin Flower resembles characters who've fully matured and bloomed flowers from their heads.
"This extraordinary marketing initiative to consumers demonstrates that at the core of Nintendo is creativity," said Peter Main, Nintendo's then-Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "Naming a flower after a video game is just one more way Nintendo is 'seeding' creative marketing." It was a crucial time for successful advertising; the Pikmin flower wasn't just promoting its namesake game, but the GameCube console as a whole. It had just debuted in 2001, and was facing competition from both the recently-launched PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's first-generation Xbox. Nintendo's marketing needed to make a splash.
The Pikmin flower
Working with agricultural brand S&G Flowers/USA, a division of Syngenta Seed that had been growing plants since the early 19th century, Nintendo of America bred the Pikmin flower (and also gave it the punny name "bacopa cabana") from the Sutera cordata plant, designing it with five white petals and a yellow center. Sutera cordata, also known as Chaenostoma cordatum, is native to South Africa, and, with enough sunshine, blooms into tightly packed, small round flowers. Chaenostoma are short-lived, evergreen perennials that grow annually in colder climates, can be a charming addition to gardens, and look great mushrooming out of hanging baskets.
Like gaming, gardening is an extremely popular pastime, and by combining the two, Nintendo hoped to catch the attention of hobbyists who perhaps hadn't considered picking up a controller instead of a trowel before. "As the number one pastime in America, gardening continues to take on broad consumer appeal among people of all ages," said Keith Cable, S&G Flowers' then-Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "With fun products like 'Pikmin,' Nintendo is connecting with consumers outside of the living room."
With the marketing campaign for "Pikmin" running over two decades ago, officially branded seeds for the Pikmin flower are now hard to come by. But it's pretty easy to grow cousins of the breed from the same genus, with flowers that closely resemble the ones inspired by the "Pikmin" characters. You can even find bacopa seeds on Amazon, like this Pikmin-esque Snowtopia breed. It would be great, however, if Nintendo started growing a real-life piranha plant to promote the next "Mario" game, because that would be a really fun addition to your garden.