For any Nintendo fan, the entrance of the company’s newly opened museum on the outskirts of Kyoto offers a warm hug of enchantment, familiarity and absolute permission to indulge. We know exactly why you are here, it seems to say, tugging at the notional sleeve of the hundreds of millions of children and adults who have worshipped this brand all their lives.
Mario’s iconic giant green plumbing pipes line the way in. A row of five Toads — loyal servants of Princess Peach — sing a song of welcome when the visitor strokes their heads. There is line of sight to a gift shop selling huge cushions in the shape of game controllers past and present.
It is perfection — and something is wrong.
Nintendo is one of the many great Japanese companies to have emerged from the ancient capital of Kyoto. It has more than enough cash to construct a purpose-built facility in the middle of the tourist-teeming city, but it has instead put this museum — for which there is now a months-long waiting list and a lottery system for the next tickets — in one of its remote old factories.
Beneath the crisp new paint and the gorgeous glimpses of Nintendology, it is a blocky industrial slab that was once used to manufacture playing cards. These were the products on which the company was founded and whose DNA still spirals through what has become a global entertainment empire and owner of some of the world’s most valuable intellectual property.
The concept of opening a Nintendo Museum at this point in the evolution of games makes obvious sense. Games are part of modern history, and are properly museum-able. The company’s first electronic Game & Watch machines emerged in 1980. Its first proper games console, the Family Computer (NES outside Japan), was launched three years later.
There are now at least three generations across the world that have grown up with this company not just being central to our idea of fun in the digital age, but actually setting the direction for the concept of entertainment, storytelling and excitement in the modern era. Joyful nostalgia always has a place, and so does the conversion of games into physical fun: that is why, 60km away in Osaka, there is the hugely successful Super Nintendo World theme park.
But a museum, in theory, has an extraordinary role to play in charting the history of the world-conquering forces that this once obscure regional Japanese company unleashed: of cataloguing and explaining Nintendo’s breakthroughs, setbacks, triumphs and mis-steps.
The museum initially looks promising in this regard. The visitor is first led to a beautifully laid-out upper floor where each of Nintendo’s consoles is displayed, along with the Japanese and international packages for the most famous or important games released on each platform.
There are also throwbacks to before Nintendo was a gaming company, with a strong array of board games, rifles, car-racing TV games, a baby stroller and a baseball bat. There are the first iterations of wildly successful electronic games such as Donkey Kong and of machines that were commercial flops, like 1995’s Virtual Boy, with its clunky head-mounted display.
The Game Boy — from Classic to Advance — the NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, Wii and Switch are laid out to be admired. All of the collections feature scores of devices in various colours and examples of the most famous games.
And there is, in volume terms, a good deal to gawp at. There are screens showing gameplay set above each section and a bank of monitors animating the evolution of Mario, under the control of Nintendo’s designer and pervading creative force, Shigeru Miyamoto.
It is all visually wonderful and a triumph of fan-service. But the intellectual gaps are enormous. There is nothing here for the curious, the knowledge-hungry or even just the fan who wants more than they can already get online. For those who do not know how Miyamoto entered Nintendo, how he managed to assert his influence on what was, fundamentally, a toymaker, or which developers were behind smash hits such as The Legend of Zelda, there is a great deal that is missing. There are no explanations of how everything was made, of the connections between the machines and the games, between their creators and the company.
There are no origin stories of the Game Boy, or the relative failure of the underpowered Wii U and the recent renaissance of Nintendo through the handheld Switch. There is no admission, anywhere, that innovation can be a messy, upsetting and frustrating business. There is no distinction between the dismal 1993 Super Mario Bros movie that bombed and the 2023 barnstormer that gave Nintendo its first huge box office success, paving the way for a planned Zelda movie. Most of what is displayed here could be purchased, with enough money and time, from the vintage gaming shops of Tokyo’s Akihabara district.
According to Nintendo, the lack of information is a feature not a bug. “The exhibits showcased are shared with little explanation . . . we encourage you to form your own unique thoughts — and to share them with others,” says the company in a statement.
But we are left to assume that Nintendo’s real treasures — the faded photographs of coders in their lairs, the conceptual thoughts of previous Nintendo presidents, the napkin sketches of characters that would become known throughout homes across the globe — are being held back somewhere. So if the Nintendo Museum is not the right place for them, then where is?
The ground floor is more deliberately fun, but enforces the distinctly miserable job of budgeting. A visitor is given a card with 10 virtual coins to spend across a variety of games that veer from satisfyingly well-known to pleasingly chaotic. Extra coins cannot be bought, for love nor money, both of which Nintendo must know — based on the prices in the gift shop — visitors have plenty.
Seven minutes of play of classic games on the NES, SNES and N64 will cost two coins. A turn on an immense, wall-sized shooting range, where NES Zappers and Super Scope guns fire digital paint at soaring Goombas and Koopa Troopas, costs four coins. Off to the side are recreations of retro Japanese sitting rooms where, for a couple more coins, you can swing a wiffle bat at ping pong balls being shot out every 10 seconds or so — extra points for hitting light fixtures, windows, teacups and the like.
Beside them are love-testing machines which demand holding hands with your partner to form a single organic controller capable of popping balloons, wearing hats and being judged on compatibility once complete. In one room, classic games can be played on enormous Nintendo controllers so large they require two players — each paying two coins — to handle.
It is all immense fun, but fun tempered by the fact that no one visitor will ever have enough coins to try all the games.
It also helps the visitor to understand what that nagging wrongness is here. The Nintendo Museum is lovely but it is, fundamentally, stingy. It is intellectually stingy with the historian, and — in terms of virtual coins — financially stingy with the nostalgic gamer. A beautiful exhibition, then, but not a museum.
museum.nintendo.com
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