The Nintendo Museum

 Did you know Nintendo has been around for 136 years? Neither did I, until we went to the Nintendo museum on Monday May 11th. It was EXTREMELY hard to get tickets, but somehow we managed and got in! Hooray!

Pipes N blocks

Yes, Nintendo was born in 1889 when it started manufacturing Hanafuda cards. Hanafuda is a game that has been played in Japan for a long time. It is played with small cards with very precise patterns depicting seasons and flowers. The point of the game is to find matches in the subtleness of the pictures. Zadi and Bop actually did a workshop on it in the museum and learned how to play - it’s very complicated and takes a long time to memorize all the possible patterns!

AI Hanafuda table

There was an extremely long period of time where Nintendo was mainly focused on perfecting the playing card business. Then, around 1950, they collaborated with Walt Disney, and started to create western style board games, such as “Mickey Mouse Adventure Game” and “Donald Duck Travel Time”. Around this period they also created game variants of Dominoes, Shogi, and Go (No pictures of this).

In 1966, with the launch of the Ultra Hand, Nintendo started making crazy gadgets and toys. We saw lots of old ads for these games playing on the museum walls. Funnily enough, the Ultra Hand was a game that you could play in the museum! It was an extendable arm that you used to grab little balls of hooks moving by. I got two points. Bop got nine.

Ultra Hand instructions

In addition to the Ultra Hand they also had many other games to play, ranging from classic video games to indoor baseball amusements. But my personal favorite was the Big Controller Challenge! In this part of the museum you chose your favorite controller and your favorite friend and played a game together on one six foot long controller. 

Indoor baseball amusement

Zadi and Me with the Wii remote

Nintendo actually only transitioned to video games in the 1970s when they created the “Game and Watch”, which was a little rectangular box with a miniature LED screen that you could play “Ball” on and look at the time. 

Game and Watch

Then comes the FamiCom! Short for family computer, this fun little cartridge console lets you play arcade titles at right at home with your family! The only thing is, back then the prices for these games were very high. For example, Donkey Kong was around fifty dollars! Which is equivalent to almost 150 dollars today! (Wow! That’s a lot of bucks!)

FamiCom

We learned more about the newer systems in the museum too. For example: the Switch (first created in 2017), Switch lite, Switch OLED, and Switch 2. This is when I started to notice a pattern: Nintendo isn’t creating many new physical things anymore, instead it is concentrating on one one idea and upgrading it. Here’s a timeline of some consoles before the Switch, and then after:

Nobody made a timeline,
so I did

One of the most amazing parts of the entire museum was the art gallery. It contained original sketches and ideas from game developers working for Nintendo. They had drawings and paintings from Legend of Zelda, Splatoon, Kirby (one of my favorites!), Mario (a classic!), Donkey Kong, StarFox and many more. Unfortunately, you weren’t allowed to take pictures.

We did eat lunch at some point, I think probably around 3 o’clock, and we went to the infamous Hatena Burger. Its 8-bit Mario theme was just a ball, and the menu was extremely cute:

This menu was designed by Smile Company

We got extra grease load burgers with their amazing “round fries”, and “Peach and Cheese Drink”.

An interesting thing to note is that the museum is not really oriented towards kids (I saw maybe 5). It’s not as amusement parky as we expected - there are no rides, prizes, or characters walking around. But that’s not a bad thing if you are a true Nintendo fan…But even if you’re not, I guarantee that you’ll find something interesting or inspiring.