Pikmin Finder

~ the goodbye ~

Pikmin Finder was built for people standing in a convention hall in Seattle on the first weekend of September 2023. Nintendo Live attendees were handed cards with a QR code on them, and the code opened a game inside the phone's browser with nothing to install. I was the better part of ten thousand kilometers from that hall, and the game was playable from here anyway, which is the part still worth saying out loud.

The game itself was small on purpose. You pointed the camera at the floor and saw Pikmin sprouted in whatever room you happened to be in. A swipe pulled them out of the ground, and a group of them could be sent off to carry a treasure back to you. Which Pikmin appeared depended on the time of day and on where you were standing. There were twenty treasures in total, and Oatchi was in it alongside the Pikmin types from Pikmin 4, which had shipped six weeks earlier.

It was free and it ran in a browser with no account attached. Reviewers liked it and were careful about how little of it there was. The Verge's Wes Davis called it the AR equivalent of a fidget spinner, worth a couple of minutes. Eurogamer found it charming. Nintendo Life filed it under harmless fun, which it plainly was, being an advertisement for Pikmin 4 that never pretended to be anything else.

On 31 December 2024 the service ended. Nintendo announced it on the game's own webpage, which is still there today, still serving the sentence saying the service for Pikmin Finder has been discontinued. Sixteen months, start to finish.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a browser and a camera ~

The technical choice is the interesting part. Nintendo did not ship an app. It used 8th Wall, the web-AR platform Niantic had bought in 2022, which let the whole thing run inside a mobile browser. For a company with Nintendo's history of keeping everything inside its own hardware and its own storefront, publishing a game that needed neither is close to out of character.

~ the seattle weekend ~

Nintendo Live 2023 ran in Seattle from 1 to 4 September. Pikmin Finder went out worldwide on the first day, but it was designed around the event, with the QR cards going to attendees and the treasures sitting in the same space as the show floor. Everyone else got the identical game without the room it had been made for.

Promotional games tied to an event usually die when the event ends. This one stayed up well over a year after the hall emptied, which is a good deal longer than the game it was advertising needed it to.

~ the engine outlived it ~

Pikmin Finder died before the platform it was built on, though not by much. Niantic wound 8th Wall down and closed platform access on 28 February 2026, seven years after it started and fourteen months after Pikmin Finder had already gone. Projects published on it keep running until February 2027, when the hosting is decommissioned and whatever data is left gets deleted.

So the shutdown notice on Nintendo's page will probably outlast the technology that once served the game, because the notice is a static page on Nintendo's own servers and the game never was. That is the ordinary way these things end: the demo goes first and the platform follows it, and what lasts is the sentence somebody wrote to explain the absence.

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