Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto, 100 years before the release of the Game Boy. Long before it was a video game company, it made hanafuda cards adorned with scenes from nature, used to play several different games popular in Japan. By 1969, Nintendo had expanded its business to include western-style playing cards and toys, and the company built a plant to manufacture them in southern Kyoto. Until 2016, the Uji Ogura Plant operated both as a card factory and as a repairs centre for the company’s consoles. Now has been turned into a Nintendo Museum, opening on 2 October, where the gaming giant’s entire history will be on display.
Nintendo flew me to Kyoto to see the museum this week. Along with the Super Nintendo World theme park, at Universal Studios in Osaka, it will be a major draw for video game tourists in Japan. It’s laid out across two floors: upstairs, there is a gallery of Nintendo products, from playing cards through to the Nintendo Switch. Downstairs are the interactive exhibits, where you can play snatches of Nintendo games on comically gigantic controllers that require two people to operate, and immerse yourself for a not-entirely-generous seven minutes in a NES, SNES or N64 game in the retro area. Or you can step into a re-creation of a 1960s Japanese home and whack ping-pong balls with a bat (the Ultra Machine batting toy was developed by Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor of the Game Boy, and released in 1967).
A hanafuda workshop offers the opportunity to try the game that launched Nintendo for yourself – with the assistance of a smart interactive game mat that tells you exactly what to do. You can then make your own hanafuda cards, with a fairly idiot-proof combination of ink, glue and stencils. The museum, like Nintendo’s games, uses technology at every step to enhance the fun.
You can try a high-tech version of Shigureden, a Japanese card game in which you match phrases of poetry, in this case using a smartphone to search for your matching card among the projections on the floor. A giant multiplayer light-gun game invites you to use an old NES Zapper or Super Scope light gun to shoot at Goombas and Koopas as they fly around on a giant projection wall. The Ultra Hand, a plastic grabber toy from 1966 that was one of Nintendo’s first hits, stars in a fairground game where you try to snatch Pokéballs and drop them into a colourful pipe. And there’s a giant arcade reimagining of the Love Tester, a 1969 gadget that invites couples to hold onto an electrode each and test their compatibility by holding hands: this time you have to play a bunch of simple games involving window-washing and wearing silly hats while holding hands, a bit like Sony’s old EyeToy games.
This is a product design museum rather than a history museum: there is almost nothing to read in the entire building. In the upstairs gallery, Nintendo’s games and consoles from across the ages are beautifully presented, with an occasional sprinkle of words to describe a particular innovation such as the Game Boy’s link cable. Golden stars mark out games and consoles that were world-firsts – and Nintendo has a lot of those, from the first cartridges that could save data (the Game Boy) to the first directional pad on a controller (the NES). But you will not read anything about who made these games or consoles and how they were developed.
This is an intentional choice. The museum is nostalgia-bait; you are naturally drawn towards whatever era of Nintendo history means the most to you. Each console, even the rather maligned Virtual Boy, gets equal space and is displayed, along with its games, controllers and many, many accessories, with equal reverence.
I’ve spent the last year writing a book about Nintendo, and I was fascinated by the relics of Nintendo’s pre-gaming history: the cards, the board games, the small televisions playing 1960s and 70s ads for ancient Nintendo products I had never seen before, such as the Mamaberica baby stroller, of which there are only a few left in the world. I was excited to see niche Japan-only Nintendo doodads such as the 64DD disk drive for the N64, which attained almost mythical status in my childhoodfrom reading about them in Nintendo 64 magazines. And if you’ve always wanted to behold the limited Olympics edition Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie Game Boy Color with your own eyes, have I got good news for you.
On show in one small corner of the gallery were a few prototype controllers and games that offered just the tiniest peek behind the curtain. The Ultra 64 and the Dolphin – development versions of the N64 and GameCube – sit alongside a couple of colourful prototype controllers for the Wii, which had one giant button in the centre of a disc-thing that you’d presumably tilt around to play. This was the only mere hint of unseen Nintendo history at this museum. Everything else in there is a finished product.
You are seeing exactly the version of Nintendo’s history the company wants you to see here: no unfinished or abandoned ideas, no details about the process behind any of the hundreds of games and consoles whose bright box-art adorns the displays. Nintendo nerds (hi!) will already know the stories behind some of these objects. Perhaps the only insight into how Nintendo thinks about its history is the way in which the museum’s curators have chosen to present it: some games are grouped around ideas, like movement (from a Twister-like board game to the Wii) and music. A wall display downstairs is labelled “a succession of ideas”, each Nintendo product (whether a success or a failure) providing a stepping stone to the next.
A certain lack of depth might disappoint visitors hoping to learn anything about Nintendo’s inner workings, but there is no lack of fun. I tried every single interactive exhibit and they were all a riot – particularly the giant controllers that had me trying to play a snatch of Super Mario 64 with ludicrously enormous buttons while another journalist wrestled with the analogue stick. (Visitors will have 10 virtual coins to spend on these interactive experiences, which definitely won’t get you through all of them – you’d have to visit at least twice to try everything.)
The museum also has many delightful details, from Pikmin hiding in tucked-away corners of the place to little Excitebike motorcycles tracing a path up the staircase railings. And, of course, there is a huge shop in which you could easily spend your savings on beautifully made T-shirts and mugs and stickers and giant controller pillows based on all of Nintendo’s consoles. The quality of the tat is unimpeachable. (I bought a little set of pin badges for every Nintendo console I’ve owned, which, unfortunately for my bank balance, is almost all of them.)
If you have even the smallest emotional attachment to Nintendo, this museum is worth a visit – though it currently operates on a lottery system for tickets, and you have to try your luck three months in advance. For any lifelong Nintendo fan, however, it will be worth the effort. This is a museum of products, but Nintendo knows that these games and consoles are more than just objects: they’re portals, both to different times in our own lives, and to gaming experiences that we cherish for decades afterwards.
What to play
A Nintendo-nostalgia recommendation this week, to fit the theme: I hadn’t gotten around to Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition until my flight over here. Rather than a straightforward collection of 1980s games, it is a chopped-up compilation of moments. You rush to complete various sections – a slice of Kirby, Metroid, Zelda, Ice Climber or Excitebike, perhaps – as fast as possible. Then you compete against yourself to do it faster. If you know these games well, it’ll make you see them in a different way; and if you’re a younger or newer player, it will make them significantly more accessible, a way of experiencing these older games without the many drawbacks of playing the originals.
Available on: Nintendo Switch
Approximate playtime: 5+ hours
What to read
Tokyo Game Show kicks off tomorrow, and there’s been a small flurry of news in the run-up. Sony announced a sequel to samurai action game Ghost of Tsushima called Ghost of Yotei, due out next year; and a remaster of Horizon Zero Dawn, coming in October. Also, Capcom’s Monster Hunter Wilds will be released on 28 February. I’ll be at the show, so expect a report in next week’s issue.
Sega has announced a new game in the Like a Dragon/Yakuza series that sounds like the most ridiculous yet: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. You will assemble a crew and sail the seas as a range of characters from the beautifully irreverent series. This is even sillier than the time that this bunch of gangsters were thrown into a zombie apocalypse.
Nintendo and Pokémon are suing the company behind Palworld, the breakout hit from January that is often described as “Pokémon with guns” and which has been accused of plagiarism. The speculation is that Nintendo has taken issue specifically with the (patented) action of throwing a ball to capture monsters, but as one lawyer explained to Gamesradar, this may be a shot across the bow, warning other developers not to stray too close to Nintendo’s ideas.
The always excellent Bitmap Books is preparing to launch A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games, a gigantic, beautiful tome looking at footie sims from the late 1970s to today. As well as the classics, it has lots of examples I’d never heard of, including the Polish ZX Spectrum penalty-taking simulation, Rzuty Karne. Fans of the genre will be over the moon. It’s published on 17 October.
What to click
Heaven 17 v Rockstar: are games being fair to music artists?
The Plucky Squire review – jolly adventures on and off the page
Question Block
Last week, reader Matt was looking for some advice for dealing with first-person-game-induced motion sickness. Here’s what you said in response:
“Using keyboard and mouse gets rid of motion sickness for me. It does mean I’m limited to playing first-person games at my desk, but I’ll take that over bouts of intense nausea …” – Naomi
“I have the same issue and also really hate the ‘soap opera effect’ you get on modern TVs. Turning film-maker mode on removes the motion smoothing and gets rid of the soap opera effect and any motion sickness problems (for me anyway!). All TVs have a version of it.” – Joe
“I wear anti-nausea bands when I game. I figured it was worth a shot if it means I can play Halo … Nausea used to gradually creep up on me. By the time I had played for a couple of hours, I would have to lay down, sip water, and eat plain crackers until it subsided. These bands changed that for me.” – Rayna
“[Getting the] widest possible field-of-view option is usually best. Camera-pan speed is crucial … Everyone has their own sweet spot, but I find it’s worst with slower speeds. I disable automatic camera correction or slow it to minimum – it means I’m doing more work with the right stick to manually correct it after having a look around, but it definitely helps. Disabling head bobbing (I think that’s the correct term) can also help, but sometimes makes it worse.” – Andy
“I’ve experienced motion sickness or vertigo playing games and watching films on other people’s setups that have a screen too large for the room. Calculating your ideal viewing distance ratio could be an easy fix.” – Pat
“I feel your reader Matt’s pain, and agree with your tips. Another thing to try is always playing in a well-lit room. It’s not ideal for the atmosphere of some games, but it makes a huge difference for me.” – Marvin
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
