Is Nintendo returning to Pikmin animated shorts?

Miyamoto first talked about them more than a dozen years ago

A series of mysterious animated shorts popped up on number of official Nintendo channels this week, confounding and exciting fans of the Japanese game maker.

In the first of the two shorts, a baby left to their own devices chases a floating pacifier, eventually standing on up to take its first wobbly steps before falling into the quickly returning mom’s arms.

In the second video, the same event plays out, but now you can see it’s Pikmin, stars of four of Nintendo’s popular games, and invisible to the human eye, that are behind the bouncing pacifier.

While the videos were obviously relatively new creations, it reminded me of a conversation I had more than a decade ago.

After a bit of thinking and rooting around on the internet, I remembered what rang such a loud bell for me.

A dozen years ago, following a wide-ranging and fascinating chat with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto for Polygon, a Nintendo employee pulled me aside to chat once more with the legendary designer about a passion project of his.

When I entered the room, Miyamoto placed a 3DS XL on the table in front of me and started a video.

Miyamoto created the video with the help of an external animation studio. He told me at the time that he used the handheld’s Flipnote Studio to create a storyboard of sorts to hand over to the studio.

He went on to co-create a video asking people to put on their 3D glasses before a movie starts. He then had it placed in 60 theaters on 150 screens around Japan to see what the reaction would be.

The success of that experiment led Miyamoto to create a longer video, which he showed me at the time.

In it, a bunch of Pikmin stumble upon Captain Olimar blending up what appears to be red Pikmin, only for them to discover it was actually carrots.

Back in 2012, Miyamoto said Nintendo was still sorting through what it wanted to do with these animated shorts. Maybe sell them directly to customers.

It’s obviously been a while since I saw those creations—and Nintendo released three shorts back in 2014—but this new video and the success of the Mario movie can’t help but make me think that Nintendo and Miyamoto are once more discussing the possibility of creating Pikmin shorts.

I can see Nintendo releasing these fun little videos you can download directly from the store onto your Switch.

It’s clear that Miyamoto is still playing around with this idea, something that back in 2012 seemed to be more of a passion project than anything official.

He did say, though, that Nintendo wanted to figure out a way to expand the sort of offerings on the eShop.

I can’t imagine that’s changed.

I’ve reached out to Nintendo for comment and will update this story if they reply.