My Visit To The Nintendo Museum Made My Life Flash Before My Eyes
More than any other game company, Nintendo loves to play with its history. Just look at how many times the NES library has reappeared across virtually every console era–remakes in Super Mario All-Stars, re-releases on Game Boy Advance, playable titles in Animal Crossing, the Wii Virtual Console, NES Remix on Wii U, and NES World Championships on Switch. Characters like Pauline from Donkey Kong can disappear in the mid-’80s and suddenly reappear decades later. And for a quarter of a decade, the Super Smash Bros. series has essentially served as a digital museum of Nintendo’s most iconic characters, worlds, and franchises. Given this fascination with its own history, it’s surprising that it took this long for Nintendo to produce a physical museum. A week before its October 2 opening, I had a chance to spend two days at the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto. As a lifelong fan of the company who credits it with my early fascination with gaming, it was a tremendous and surprisingly personal experience that I won’t forget.
Nintendo’s first-party titles have always been filled with a certain polish that can feel like magic at times, so it should serve as no surprise that the company’s obsessive attention to detail translates to a physical space. As you enter the main building (well, after you pass the line of five Toads who sing if you bonk their heads around), you’re ushered into a holding area before the escalator to the exhibit space. In this dimly lit room, silhouettes of various Nintendo consoles light up in sync with the sounds of their startup chimes. From there you step onto the escalator and are greeted with ambient console-menu music as you’re ushered upstairs. The first visible element of the exhibit room is a scoreboard-style box hanging from the ceiling with screens on each side. It displays startup screens of various consoles such as the iconic GameCube intro. It’s very cool to see the entrance to the museum replicate the feeling of turning on a Nintendo console, from the chime to the logo animation to the menu music.
As you reach the top of the escalator, you suddenly emerge in the center of 360 degrees of Nintendo’s history. It’s almost overwhelming to go from a dark room and escalator to a panorama of sights and sounds from Nintendo. Game displays, massive controllers, and dozens of screens surrounded me as I entered the space, and I found myself randomly walking to the left to look at my first display. It was for the Nintendo DS, and I spent a couple of minutes taking in a wall of game boxes before I decided that I needed to have an attack plan for the exhibits or I was bound to miss something.