The Nintendo Museum Is A Tribute To Nintendo That Could Only Be Made By Nintendo

Earlier this week, Mario's dad Shigeru Miyamoto took viewers on a virtual tour of the new Nintendo Museum in Kyoto. From the first exterior shots of the building — which is reminiscent of one of Nintendo's early boxy, gray consoles — it was clear that this was the kind of tribute to Nintendo's history that only Nintendo could make.

Celebrating Nintendo History In The Spot Where It Actually Happened

The building that now houses the museum, Miyamoto explained, is "built on the site of the original factory where Nintendo made Hanafuda and other playing cards. Quality checks happened here during the Famicom era. I used to come here often so it feels nostalgic to me."

It isn't uncommon for places with historical significance to be preserved in this way — my wife works at a historic house museum — but there aren't many important places from gaming history that have been given this treatment. It's a comparatively young medium, one that is often too focused on what comes next to preserve what came before. Choosing the old factory as the site for the museum seems like a statement of intent from Nintendo, an attempt to highlight the company's humble roots as a toy manufacturer.

Those roots stretch from its latest successes with the Switch (though, pointedly, not the forthcoming Switch 2, all the way back to its founding in 1889. Nintendo is honoring that history in the museum with a traditional exhibit space where game boxes and consoles are on display, and featuring multiple side-by-side screens that show the evolution of Mario from his earliest games through to Odyssey.

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Even In Its Museum, Nintendo Embodies Pure Play

What struck me as especially notable is the museum's clear dedication to incorporating Nintendo's approach to game design into the actual museum experience. A museum that felt stuffy or humorless wouldn't fit the gaming company that has most consistently made games, like Super Mario 64 and Super Smash Bros. Melee and Wii Sports, that embody the spirit of pure play. Miyamoto showed off a wide, open room where people used their phones to play a Japanese card game, Hyakunin Isshu, using a huge LED screen on the floor.

In a different room, the museum paid homage to Nintendo transforming old bowling alleys into lightgun arcades in the '80s with a lightgun game that tasked players with frantically taking out koopas while avoiding hitting Mario's pals. My favorite room shown in the video had several TVs hooked up to massive controllers that required two people to operate. Miyamoto and a museum employee played through Super Mario Bros. World 1-1, with the iconic game designer handling movement on the D-pad and the museum employee pressing the A and B buttons. A wide shot of the room showed that there were similar displays with huge Wiimotes and N64 controllers.

Nintendo has always had a toyetic approach to console design, prioritizing systems that can do cool new things instead of focusing on beefing up the console's graphical power. At times, that has cost it the hardcore audience. The Wii brought motion controls to the living room and got whole new generations into gaming, but its lack of graphical power and different control scheme led to it sacrificing its status as a ‘serious console’ where era-defining games like Assassin's Creed or BioShock or Call of Duty could be released.

The Switch, similarly toyetic in its attempt to bridge handheld and console gaming in a unique way, has become a destination for all gamers, hardcore or casual. Nintendo hasn’t changed. And now, by introducing entirely new ways to play that can only realistically be implemented in a museum installation, Nintendo is approaching its own history with that same signature sense of play.

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