Make no mistake – Pikmin 4 is not confirmed.
If you’ve been living under a rock, you may have missed that one of the most hyped games of 2020 so far is the upcoming Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The doesn’t drop until the twentieth, but everyone has their eyes locked.
To help everyone keep track of when it releases, Nintendo created a bot for Twitter that alerts anyone who likes it on the release. To confirm it, they respond with a twitter tag and state “Confirmed! We’ll send you a note when #AnimalCrossing: New Horizons releases on 3/20.”
Seems harmless, right? It really is. Thankfully, though, the gaming community never stops finding ways to troll the rest of the community into a hype train. One Twitter user decided to find a way to trick the announcement bot into confirming another highly-anticipated title.
Some Twitter user had the bright idea to make a new account and make their handle @Pikmin42020, then went and liked the tweet. This prompted the bot to tweet out the same message it does when anyone likes it, but with an expertly placed name to change the whole meaning.
“@Pikmin42020 Confirmed! We’ll send you a note when #AnimalCrossing: New Horizons releases on 3/20.”
Get it? Pikmin 4, 2020, confirmed is all the Nintendo community heard the second that tweet went out, and they’ve been absolutely buzzing the whole day.
“Nintendo sends AC: NH reminder tweets to Twitter accounts,” popular Nintendo Brand Ambassador Arlo tweeted in response. “One of them has the username Pikmin42020, creating the combination of words ‘Pikmin 4 2020 confirmed.’ People find this and freak out. This is how desperate we are. This is what Nintendo is doing to our poor minds.”
It’s all in good fun, but what a cute little way to absolutely crush a few spirits out there. At first glance, all you’re really going to notice is a seeming confirmation of Pikmin 4, which would likely be just as big of a deal as Animal Crossing: New Horizons is being hyped up to be. Sure, it’s been nearly eight years since New Leaf came out, but it’s been almost seven since Pikmin 3, so there’s almost just as much of a gap between both.
So, no, Pikmin 4 hasn’t been confirmed for 2020 by any means. All we have is an incredibly clever way to troll a massive amount of people with the smallest amount of effort possible. New Horizons will still be here in six days, though, so don’t forget to like the bot with your own unnecessarily silly name to trick more people into anticipating something!
