The Nintendo Museum will open on October 2 in Kyoto, Japan. The museum is built on the site of a former Nintendo factory from the 1970s that manufactured traditional Japanese gaming cards.
On the first floor, several display cases trace the evolution of Nintendo console design and the graphics of Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda games. The ground floor is dedicated to interactive experiences. Most of the activities offered are immersive: you can play cards virtually using a smartphone connected to a screen on the floor or shoot laser guns on a giant screen inspired by the 1992 Super Nintendo game. Some rooms, inspired by Japanese interiors from the 1970s, display vintage Nintendo games accessible to visitors.
Nintendo is the world leader in video games with 5.5 billion video games and more than 800 million consoles sold worldwide. The Japanese company was founded 135 years ago in 1889. Originally, Nintendo was a home entertainment company that manufactured traditional hanafuda and karuta playing cards before specializing in console manufacturing and video game design from 1977. Nintendo is behind world-famous franchises such as Pokémon, Mario and Animal Crossing as well as iconic consoles such as the Wii and Nintendo DS.
Japan, the birthplace of video games, created “Huis Ten Bosch”, the first museum dedicated to video games in 2014 in the gigantic eponymous theme park in Nagasaki. In 2021 a section dedicated to the video game “Super Nintendo World” was opened in the Universal Studios Japan theme park in Osaka.
In France, video games are booming with 37.4 million players, 88% of whom are over 18 years old. The first French video game museum should soon see the light of day under the name of “Projet Odyssée” initiated by the YouTuber Tev-Ici Japon and the collector Ludovic Charles. Scheduled to open in 2026, the 3,500 m2 museum will be located in the Bussy Saint-Georges leisure center (Seine et Marne) not far from Disney Land.
Exhibitions dedicated to video games are multiplying and questioning the status of video games. In 2023, the exhibition “Open Museum video game” at the Palais des beaux-arts in Lille proposed a dialogue between classic works from the permanent collections and immersive sets created by the video game creation studios Ankama and Spiders. Through a selection of works by contemporary artists, the recent exhibition “Worldbuilding. Video games and art in the digital age” at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2024 aimed to legitimize video games as a digital art in its own right.
