This article originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.
The Uji Kokura Factory was built in 1969 in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, and was responsible for the production of toys. After more than half a century, it has been reborn as the Nintendo Museum. It will open to the public on October 2, 2024.
Nintendo recently announced details of the new museum. In addition to displaying all the products the company has released since it was founded as a playing card company in 1889, the museum will also feature experiential exhibits. In the three experiential sections, “Learn,” “Experience,” and “Create/Play,” visitors can experience what the various products created throughout Nintendo’s long history would be like if they were made today using current technology.
Rediscover the fun
The first floor of the museum is taken up by an exhibit that allows visitors to experience new interactive content based on older Nintendo products, created especially for the museum. Hyakunin Isshu, It’s a set of 100 historical Japanese poems that take up an entire room. Players open a dedicated app and read the first stanza of one of the poems aloud. The player then has to walk around the room with giant cards scattered on the floor and find the card that corresponds to the continuation of the poem they just heard.
In addition to being able to play with Nintendo’s previous home game consoles and their peripherals, players can also enjoy new mini-games based on toys such as the “Ultra Machine,” a pitching machine released by Nintendo in the 1960s, and the “Ultra Hand,” an extendable hand that can stretch and grab objects, as well as a new mini-game based on the “Love Tester,” which measures the romantic compatibility between two people.
Many of the mini-games offer a different experience from the original simply by changing the scale, such as “Big Controller,” in which two players play a console game using giant versions of traditional hardware controllers, or “Game & Watch SP,” in which players control various titles in the Game & Watch series, a pocket-sized portable LCD game, using only their own shadows.
Visitors to the Nintendo Museum will need “coins” to experience these experiences. Ten coins are distributed per person upon admission, and the number of coins required varies depending on the exhibits and mini-games. However, visitors must make a choice, as it is not possible to experience all the exhibits with only ten coins.
