A Nintendo Pilgrimage: My Unforgettable Week in Kyoto (part 2)

Touchdown in Kyoto

After months of anticipation, my Japan trip began on October 1st, 2024. And the very first day already brought a number of highlights.

A direct flight from Amsterdam took thirteen hours to reach Kansai Airport in Osaka Bay.

From there, a short train ride brought me to my destination for the week: Kyoto!

With some time to spare before checking into my hotel, I headed to the Nintendo store.

The Kyoto Nintendo Store—one of only three in Japan at the time (the others being in Osaka and Tokyo)—offers a wide range of exclusive merchandise.

I managed to restrain myself, knowing there would be more shopping opportunities ahead at the museum store.

A Night at Marufukuro

Next stop: the Marufukuro hotel.

There I was joined by Florent and Fabrice, who had traveled to Kyoto separately. We would spend much of the coming days together.

Nintendo playing cards featuring Marilyn Monroe

Vintage company documents are a great resource for historians and collectors. Like this Nintendo Playing Cards report from the 1950s, which was covered in full in a previous post.

It shows the range of playing card designs offered by Nintendo at the time.

At the center of the page featuring 'PR cards' is a deck with one of the most iconic images to come out of the United States in the 20th century: Marilyn Monroe lying on a bed sheet.

Although the inclusion of this card in the company report confirmed it was part of Nintendo's product catalogue at the time, we had never seen an actual copy.

Until today!

This copy was recently discovered by Nintendo playing card collector Fabrice Heilig, and I acquired it on his behalf.

A Nintendo Pilgrimage: My Unforgettable Week in Kyoto (part 1)

Last October, I embarked on what can only be described as the most unforgettable Nintendo week of my life.

It all unfolded in Kyoto — the birthplace of Nintendo and still the beating heart of all things Nintendo.

Over the course of just seven days, I visited the Nintendo store, spent a night at the historic Marufukuro hotel (the former Nintendo headquarters), and experienced the Nintendo Museum on its opening day—and again two days later. We met, for the first time as a group, with long-time friends and fellow Nintendo historians, tracked down a copy of a rare and significant document from Nintendo's history, and enjoyed dinner with the legendary Satoru Okada, former head of R&D at Nintendo. We paid our respects to his late mentor, Gunpei Yokoi, and ended the journey with a visit to Super Nintendo World in Osaka.

It was a week packed with memories, insights, and fun activities — too much to cover in a single blog post. So this will be a series, where I will do my best to share the experience. Let's-a go!

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It's not going to happen, or is it?

In an interview with Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream before to the opening of the Nintendo Museum, Shigeru Miyamoto - the legendary game designer and unofficial director of the museum - reflected on its creation:

今回ミュージアムを作ろうと決めたとき、一番心配したのは山内（山内溥さん、元任天堂社長）がいたら「そんなもんやめとけ」と言うだろうな、ということでした。

When we decided to create the museum, my biggest worry was thinking, "If Yamauchi-san were still around, he'd probably say, 'Don't bother with something like that.'"

For decades, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the long-time president of Nintendo, guided the company with a relentless focus on innovation over retrospection. This mindset made the idea of a museum seem at odds with Nintendo’s forward-thinking philosophy. Honestly, until a few years ago, I also believed that Nintendo would never "bother with that."

Yet here we are. In a Nintendo Direct streamed in August 2024, Shigeru Miyamoto stands at the entrance of the soon-to-be-opened Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, Japan.

A Museum Years in the Making

The first announcement came three years earlier, in June 2021, when Nintendo revealed its intention to establish "...a new gallery to showcase the many products Nintendo has launched over its history...as a way to share Nintendo’s product development history and philosophy with the public."

The location was also confirmed: "... the Nintendo Uji Ogura Plant will be renovated to accommodate the gallery, a decision reached after taking consideration of The City of Uji’s plan of re-developing the nearby Ogura Station area".

The Nintendo Uji Plant back in 1970

The Nintendo Uji Ogura Plant is a facility on the outskirts of Kyoto that had been in use since the 1970s but was inactive since 2016.

The Uji Plant at around the time of the 'Nintendo Gallery' announcement

An artist’s impression included in the press release offered a first glimpse of the planned transformation.

The announcement sparked great excitement among the Nintendo fan community, myself included. But patience was required—three years of it, as Nintendo clarified that "the facility, tentatively named 'Nintendo Gallery'... is expected to be completed within our 2023 Fiscal Year, which ends in March 2024."

From Cards to Condiments: Nintendo’s Ads in a Disney Booklet from the 1960s

Disney's first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (originally released in 1937), premiered in Japan in 1950. This release came shortly after the end of World War II, during a period when Japan was still under American occupation, and the Japanese public was eager for entertainment and exposure to international culture.

The success of Snow White in Japan paved the way for subsequent releases of the entire Disney catalogue in the country over the following decades.

In July of 1964, Disney's The Sword in the Stone was released in Japan, approximately seven months after its initial premiere in the United States.

The Japanese version of the film is titled The King's Sword (王様の剣).

The booklet shown here is a program that was likely handed out to moviegoers for free.

It measures 27.5 by 30 centimeters and has 28 pages, with eight pages printed in full color and the remaining pages in pink monochrome.

The booklet includes background information about the film, details of the production process, and information about the Disney company.

Additionally, the booklet contains numerous advertisements for Disney merchandise available in Japan, including one from a company very familiar to readers of this blog.

Ten years of Before Mario book memories

Last October (2024), I posted this image on social media, announcing that the Before Mario book was officially sold out. All stock had been depleted, and there are no plans for another print run.

Originally published a little over a decade ago, I thought this would be a good moment to reflect on the journey of the book and share some memories from that time.

How it started

I have always been a collector first and foremost, with a growing passion for vintage Nintendo items.

The Before Mario collection back in 2007

In 2011, I started this blog, thinking it would be fun to share stories and information about my collection and Nintendo’s early history. 

At the time, there was very little information available online about this period of Nintendo, and the blog quickly found an engaged and growing audience.

The first review of the blog, in Edge magazine

Over the next three years, I covered a lot of ground, publishing 180 blog posts. Then, in January 2014, I received a proposal from Nintendo historian and publisher Florent Gorges, founder of Omaké Books, to turn part of the blog into a book.

I loved the idea and quickly reached an agreement with Florent to move forward with the project.

Getting to work

Although the original plan was to reuse content from the blog, I decided to reshoot all the photography specifically for the book to ensure the best possible print quality.

Meet the Collectors - #13 - Elijah Luttmann

Today I am happy to welcome another collector in our intermittent series of Meet the Collectors!

Let's hand over the mic to Elijah!

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"Hello I’m Elijah Luttmann and I live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania USA. I’m 19 years old and I am currently at college to learn the Chinese language."

"My earliest memories of playing Nintendo are from the early 2010s. I believed it was at my cousins’ house and we played MarioKart Wii. My cousins got me into Nintendo but it wasn’t until around 2017 when I began researching Nintendo’s history and found out how old it was. The first pre-videogame Nintendo item I got was in 2022 and it was the Ultra Machine."

"Pretty much all of my vintage collection comes from eBay but hopefully I can start using Yahoo! Auctions as they have good prices. Sometimes my computer will be full of tabs with item listings that I hope to get."

"Nintendo’s history before games is not well covered and is sometimes overlooked because of how difficult it is to find information on this era. Just hearing the stories of how certain Nintendo toys came to be is fascinating and I love talking about it with those who are interested. As a young child I would actually make my own versions of these products such as the playing cards. I would copy the images by hand."

Elijah's hand-drawn version of a Nintendo promotional item from 1915

"The Paper Model kits are one item I am fond of because I bought them from Nikita Shogov (another collector featured on this site). It's great to see collectors passing off part of  their collection to others." 

"The Color TV Game 6 means a lot to me because it was released around the same time as Shigeru Miyamoto joined Nintendo. Miyamoto is someone I admire a lot for his creativity and passion. When I see these toys I want to be able to tell the stories behind them. For example the Ultra Hand was created by Gunpei Yokoi and it was a toy he made out of scrap parts at Nintendo. Yamauchi saw the potential in Yokoi and it led to him creating some of the most innovative toys and eventually video game innovations."

Nintendo ad in 1960s Playboy magazine

When MB's Twister was first released in the 1960s, Nintendo acquired the rights to localize the game for the Japanese market.

Various box versions of Nintendo Twister

Nintendo targeted the game at families as well as groups of young adults.

As we showed in a previous post on this blog, to connect with the latter group, they sponsored editorial content and placed an ad in Men's Club magazine.

Men's Club magazine November 1967 

I recently discovered another ad that was included in the Japanese magazine Weekly Playboy (週刊プレイボーイ).

As an aside, this Playboy magazine is not affiliated with the internationally renowned publication featuring the rabbit logo (which first appeared in the Japanese market in the mid-1970s), although the content is similar. This publication simply shares the same name—likely not by coincidence.

In the August 8, 1966 edition, we find a full-page ad by Nintendo strategically placed next to that week's centerfold model (referred to, again probably not coincidentally, as a "Playmate").