Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come to witness momijigari, the changing colors of autumn leaves in the city’s scenic parks. This autumn, however, there is a new attraction: a Nintendo museum.
This new destination, opening on Wednesday, can best be described as a shrine to video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo’s various gaming consoles, from the 1983 Famicom to the 1996 Nintendo 64 and the 2017 Switch, are displayed with reverence alongside their iconic games.
On the back wall, visitors can also look at toys, playing cards, and other relics from the Japanese company’s pre-video-game era, dating back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card company in 1889.
Downstairs, the museum offers interactive exhibits featuring comically oversized controllers and floor-projected playing cards. A visitor interacts with a large motion-sensor screen in the museum.
Located on the grounds of Nintendo’s former manufacturing plant in Uji, a town just 20 minutes by train south of central Kyoto, the museum expects to welcome up to 2,000 visitors per day.
Tickets, priced at 3,300 yen (about £17) for adults, are sold via a lottery system and are booked out three months in advance.
The Uji Ogura plant, which opened in 1969, once produced toys and playing cards—Nintendo’s core business at the time. After the rise of video games in the 1970s, it functioned as a console repair center until 2016.
Though far from Kyoto’s main tourist spots, the surrounding suburban area has been preparing for a surge of visitors, with its train station being renovated in anticipation of the crowds of fans wearing Mario hats.
Nintendo’s creative mastermind, Shigeru Miyamoto—the creator of the Mario and Zelda franchises and a clear influence on the museum’s design—frequently visited this site when it was an operational factory in the 1970s and 80s.
“This is a place of memories,” he remarked at a press conference during the museum’s preview event last week.
“We were considering how to preserve it, and then the idea came up: why not turn it into a museum? Our original headquarters on Toba-kaido was considered as a potential site, but we felt [Uji] was better for transportation.
Plus, this area has become rather run-down. Since this was where our first factory was, we wanted to help revitalize the area. We hope to work with the local community to develop [the museum] so that it won’t be resented by the locals.”
During their visit, guests receive 10 virtual coins to spend on the museum’s interactive exhibits.
An adjacent workshop offers visitors a chance to make their own Japanese hanafuda playing cards, while a café serves custom burgers.
Despite Nintendo’s reputation for closely guarding its creative processes and corporate secrets, there is little insight into how the games or consoles were made, or the key figures involved in their development. Only a small collection of prototype controllers gives a rare glimpse behind the scenes.
This museum joins a growing list of video game-related tourist attractions in Japan. For decades, international fans have flocked to the “geek mecca” of Akihabara in Tokyo, with its jam-packed electronics shops, retro game stores, hidden arcade cabinet specialists, and a wide range of manga and anime-themed cafés.
Additionally, the Super Nintendo World theme park at Osaka’s Universal Studios—now the third-most-visited theme park globally—draws in massive crowds, as do game-themed restaurants across Japan, such as those dedicated to Kirby, Monster Hunter, and Final Fantasy.
A Pokémon theme park is also in the works in Inagi, Tokyo. Nintendo fans take selfies at the Super Nintendo World theme park in Osaka.
“Companies like Nintendo are incredibly important to Japan’s cultural exports,” said Gearoid Reidy.
“These cultural exports and tourism work hand-in-hand—people visit Japan partly due to their interest in things like Nintendo. Over time, they bring back trends they’ve experienced here—like the growing popularity of ramen over the past few decades.”
The Japanese government’s “Cool Japan” initiative, revealed in June, aims to quadruple the overseas market for video games, manga, anime, and other cultural exports over the next decade.
For Nintendo, though, this museum is more about honoring its own corporate legacy. “I hope people will understand what Nintendo is through all of these past products,” said Miyamoto. “It would be a shame to let all this gather dust in a warehouse.”
