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 toys and hanafuda cards adorned with scenes from nature, used to play several games popular in Japan. By 1969, Nintendo had expanded its business to include western-style playing cards, and the company built a plant to manufacture them in southern Kyoto. Until 2016, the Uji Ogura plant was a card factory and repairs centre for the company's consoles. It has been turned into a Nintendo Museum, which opened this week.
Nintendo flew me to Kyoto to see the museum.
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 interactive exhibits, where you can play snatches of 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.
A hanafuda workshop offers the opportunity to try the game that launched Nintendo for yourself with the assistance of a smart interactive game mat. You can then make your own hanafuda cards, with a fairly idiot-proof combination of ink, glue and stencils.
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