This story originally appeared in WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.
Built in 1969 in the city of Uji, Kyoto, the Uji Kokura factory was originally dedicated to the production of toys. Now, more than half a century later, the factory has been reborn as the Nintendo MuseumIt will open to the public on October 2, 2024.
Nintendo has recently revealed details about the new museum. In addition to showcasing products that the company has released in the past (since its founding as a playing card company in 1889), the facility will also feature interactive exhibits. There are three interactive sections, called “Learn,” “Experience,” and “Create & Play,” where visitors can experience what it would be like if Nintendo’s various products from its long history were created today, using current technology.
Reinventing fun
The first floor of the museum is dominated by an exhibit where you can experience new interactive content, created exclusively for the museum and based on old Nintendo products. There is a giant version of a card game based on Hyakunin Isshu, A set of 100 historical Japanese poems that take up an entire room. Players open a dedicated app that reads aloud the first verse of one of the poems. Players then have to navigate the room where giant cards are scattered on the floor to find the corresponding card that continues the poem they just heard.
Visitors can also play with historic Nintendo home game consoles and peripherals, as well as new mini-games based on toys released by Nintendo in the 1960s, such as the Ultramachine launching machine and the Ultra handwhich featured a telescopic hand that could extend and grab objects. You can also try out a new minigame based on the Love testerwhich aims to measure whether two people are romantically compatible.
Many of the minigames offer experiences that differ from the original simply by changing the scale, such as Big Controller, in which two people play a console game using giant versions of earlier hardware controllers. There’s also Game & Watch SP, in which players control various titles in the Game & Watch series of pocket-sized, LCD-screened handheld games using only their shadows.
Visitors to the Nintendo Museum will need “coins” to interact with each of these experiences. Each person receives 10 coins upon entering the museum, and the number of coins required varies depending on the exhibit or minigame. However, it is not possible to experience all of the exhibits with just 10 coins, so visitors will have to choose.