You won’t need an emulator to play Pikmin on your phone or PC

Decompiling a game is typically a prerequisite for it to be (unofficially) ported to modern platforms, allowing people to play it without using an emulator. The decompilation process takes plenty of time and effort, but we’ve already seen a few GameCube titles reaching this milestone. Now, we can add another prominent title to this list.

The GC/Wii Decompilation Discord group has announced that popular first-party GameCube game Pikmin has now been 100% decompiled. Decompilation is basically the time-consuming process of reverse-engineering a game’s original code and functions. This usually opens the door for others to then unofficially port the game to other platforms like Windows and Android.

This is officially the group’s fifth GameCube game to be 100% decompiled, joining Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Mario Party 4, and the N64 emulator for GameCube. In fact, we’ve subsequently seen Animal Crossing ported to some ANBERNIC handhelds, while Twilight Princess and Mario Party 4 were ported to desktops and Android. So there’s a good chance we’ll see PC and/or Android ports of Pikmin in the coming months.

Decompilation projects have also led to other games being ported to new platforms. These include The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Driver 2, and the original Jak and Daxter.

These unofficial fan ports are usually a major upgrade over emulation, as they often include more graphical options, support for modern controllers, and mod functionality. Best of all, these ports typically offer much better performance than the same title running under emulation.

In saying so, I’d watch out for vibecoded ports of Pikmin in the coming days and weeks. We’ve seen an explosion in people without development expertise using AI to unofficially port games to modern platforms, often resulting in disappointing performance and bugs.