Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come to momijigarithe changing of autumn leaves in the city’s picturesque parks. This fall, however, there’s a new attraction: a Nintendo museum.
The new attraction, which opens Wednesday, is best described as a video game nostalgia chapel. Above, Nintendo’s many video game consoles, from 1983’s Famicom to 1996’s Nintendo 64 and 2017’s Switch, are reverently displayed alongside its most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also see toys, playing cards and other artifacts from the Japanese company’s pre-video game history, dating back to its founding as hanafuda playing card maker in 1889. On the ground floor, there are interactive exhibits with comically giant controllers and playing cards projected onto the floor.
Located on the site of the video game company’s former manufacturing plant in Uji, a 20-minute train ride south of central Kyoto, the museum is expected to welcome up to 2,000 people a day. Tickets, which are allocated through a lottery system and cost 3,300 yen (£17) for an adult, sell out three months in advance. When it opened in 1969, Nintendo’s Uji Ogura plant made the toys and playing cards that made money for Nintendo at the time. After the dawn of the video game era in the 1970s, it served as a customer service center for console repairs until 2016. The building is far from other tourist attractions in Kyoto: the surrounding suburban city has been renovating its station train, preparing for an avalanche of visitors wearing Mario hats.
Nintendo creative guru Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Mario and Zelda series and an obvious influence on the museum’s conservation, used to visit the site frequently when it was still a working factory in the 1970s and 1980s. “This is a place of memories,” he said at a news conference during a preview event at the museum last week. “We were exploring how to preserve it in some way, and then the suggestion came up: Why not turn it into a museum? Our original headquarters in Toba-kaido was one of the candidates (for a museum site), but we decided that (Uji) would be convenient for transportation, and this area is now quite run down. Since this is where we had our first factory, we wanted to help revitalize the area…We would like to work with the local community to develop (the museum) so that the local population does not resent it.”
Visitors receive 10 virtual coins per visit, which are used to spend in the interactive exhibits. an adjacent hanafuda The workshop guides visitors in creating their own Japanese playing cards, above a cafe serving custom burgers. Given Nintendo’s notorious secrecy about its creative process – and corporate secrets – it is perhaps not surprising that there is no information about how the games or consoles on display were made, or who played a role in their development. Just a small sample of factory prototype controllers offers a brief peek behind the curtain.
This museum is one of a growing number of video game tourist destinations in Japan. For decades, international video game fans have flocked to Tokyo’s “geek mecca” of Akihabara, with its crowded electronics stores, once-grand arcades, retro game stores, hidden arcade specialists, and a lots of manga and anime. Themed cafes. But now there’s also the Super Nintendo World theme park at Universal Studios Osaka, the third most visited theme park in the world, and restaurants in all major Japanese cities themed around famous games like Kirby, Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy. A Pokémon theme park is also in the works in Inagi, Tokyo.
“Companies like Nintendo are enormously important to Japan’s cultural exports,” said Bloomberg Japanese columnist Gearoid Reidy. “These cultural exports and tourism form a symbiotic relationship: Tourists come to Japan, perhaps in part because they are interested in, say, Nintendo. Over time, they absorb new trends they find and bring them home (think of the rise of ramen in recent decades).
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“Firms like Sega or Sanrio, or properties like Jujutsu Kaisen or Elden Ring, are the ones that are really driving affection for the country right now. They are one of the main drivers of the increase in people arriving in the country, which has multiplied by seven in just 20 years.”
The Japanese government’s new Cool Japan strategy, announced in June, aims to quadruple the overseas market for video games, manga, anime and other cultural exports over the next decade. But for Nintendo, this museum is about preserving its own corporate heritage. “I hope people understand what Nintendo is through all these previous products,” Miyamoto said. “It would be a shame to have all this collecting dust in a warehouse.”