What You'll Find at the Nintendo Museum
I'll admit, when I first heard Nintendo was opening a museum in Uji, I pictured something small — a lobby with a few glass cases and a gift shop. What actually opened on October 2, 2024, is a lot more ambitious than that. The Nintendo Museum isn't a renovation of some older company showroom; it's a from-scratch building designed to trace the company's history from playing cards through home consoles to the games we're all still playing today. And it keeps growing. New exhibits keep getting layered in — most recently an Art Gallery in 2025, and, on the horizon, a full restaurant — so this feels less like a fixed monument and more like a place that's still being written.
Getting In: Uji, Reservations, and the Museum's Approach
The museum sits in Uji, just south of Kyoto — better known, historically, for tea fields than pixel art, which honestly makes the contrast kind of wonderful. You won't just show up and walk in, though. Nintendo runs the place on an advance-reservation, controlled-visitor system, more like a theme park attraction than a conventional corporate museum. That's very deliberate: this is a brand experience built for focus, not a hall you skim in twenty minutes between other errands. So… book ahead. Set a reminder. It's worth the planning.
Inside Exhibition Building 1: Hardware and Games Side by Side
Once you're through the doors, Exhibition Building 1 is where most of the history lives. Contrary to some talk online that the museum has been steadily moving away from showing hardware, that's not really what's happening — original consoles and peripherals are still displayed right alongside the games that made them matter. It's a nice reminder that Nintendo's story has always been a hardware story and a software story at once, and the museum treats both with equal weight.
The New Art Gallery: Concept Art from Mario, Zelda, and More
In September 2025, the museum added something I think a lot of longtime fans had quietly been hoping for: an Art Gallery exhibit on the 2nd floor of Exhibition Building 1, filled with concept art and development materials from series like Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Animal Crossing. It's the kind of room where you slow down without meaning to — early character sketches, design documents, the visual scaffolding behind games you've probably put hundreds of hours into. If you're the type who reads the 'making of' bonus features before the credits finish rolling, budget extra time here.
Marking 40 Years of Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. turned 40 in 2025 (it launched back in 1985), and the museum marked the anniversary with a History Board installed in the 1st-floor hallway of Exhibition Building 1 — a wall of illustrations spanning past Mario games that you scan with the Nintendo Today! app to unlock videos and music tied to each era. It's a lighter-touch tribute than a dedicated new attraction, but a genuinely fun one, especially paired with special anniversary tickets and a temporary plaza lighting installation running from December 3, 2025 through April 27, 2026. If a big Mario-shaped centerpiece exhibit is what you're picturing, adjust expectations a little — this is more scavenger hunt than shrine, and I mean that as a compliment.
What Fans Are Reporting (and What's Still Unconfirmed)
Here's where I want to be upfront with you: alongside the museum's own official announcements, there's a layer of visitor and enthusiast chatter describing things like reconstructed developer rooms, original Famicom-era development machines, audio workstations looping soundtracks by Nintendo composers, displays walking through how ROM data was transferred onto cartridge modules, and even handwritten 1980s level-design plans said to come from Nintendo's own archives in Kyoto. Some accounts also mention video interviews with veteran developers and talk programs moderated by game historians. I haven't been able to confirm these directly against official museum materials, so treat them as things to watch for rather than guaranteed exhibits — the lineup does shift, so it's worth checking current listings before you build your visit around any one of them.
A New Chapter: The Super Family Restaurant
Then in June 2026, Nintendo announced its next move: a dining venue called the Super Family Restaurant, planned to open later that same year. Details are still filling in, but it fits the pattern — this museum keeps expanding sideways into a full brand experience rather than staying a static hall of glass cases. First a game history museum, then an art gallery, now a restaurant. I'm curious what era-themed dish someone dreams up next.
Picking Up Japanese Along the Way
One quiet perk of a place like this, for anyone chipping away at Japanese: signage, exhibit labels, and staff announcements give you real, low-pressure reading and listening practice tied to words you already care about — 博物館 (hakubutsukan, museum) for museum, 展示 (tenji, exhibit, display) for exhibit, 予約 (yoyaku, reservation, booking) for reservation. You're not decoding a train timetable under pressure; you're standing in front of a Famicom cartridge case, curious what the label says. That's the kind of context that actually sticks.
Planning Your Visit
- Book your reservation slot well ahead of your Kyoto or Osaka trip — the controlled-entry system means walk-ins aren't really the plan here.
- Pair it with Uji itself; you're already out past the tea-field side of Kyoto, so give yourself time beyond just the museum.
- Check the current exhibit list before you go, since anniversary displays and add-ons like the Art Gallery have been arriving on their own schedule.
- If the Super Family Restaurant has opened by the time you visit, it's worth folding into the day rather than planning it as a separate trip.
You'll eventually find your own Nintendo Museum moment — mine was standing in front of an old console I hadn't thought about in years and being surprised by how much I remembered. Come hang out here, take your time, and let the place surprise you a little too.
