Nintendo Museum Official Book Vol.01

One volume, two frames

Nintendo Museum Official Book Vol.01 combines a museum guide with features marking forty years of Super Mario Bros. Nintendo identifies separate Japanese and English editions and restricts this named publication to the museum. Those two subjects give the volume a specific frame: the life of one game alongside a much wider collection.

Familiar objects, unfamiliar neighbours

The museum’s exhibition description says its products are presented with relatively little explanation, inviting visitors to make connections themselves. Its Art Gallery adds original character artwork and selected development materials from several Nintendo series. These are complementary approaches: finished objects show what reached people, while development material opens a window onto making.

Our reading of that arrangement is that recognition can lead into comparison. Remembering a controller’s shape is a starting point; looking beside it may prompt questions about what changed, what stayed familiar and how a design makes itself understood.

What changes when a controller grows?

One interactive exhibit enlarges older controllers so that two people operate them together. Nintendo describes the retained shape and altered scale as producing a different play experience.

That is a compact design lesson. An interface can keep its outline while changing the coordination it demands. A movement once managed by one pair of hands becomes a shared task. Thinking about scale makes even a familiar game object newly legible.

The building has a working past

The museum’s site history begins with the Uji plant’s construction in 1969. Over the following decades, the location served different combinations of manufacturing, storage, inspection and customer-support functions. Playing-card production is part of that history, and the museum opened in 2024.

This sequence gives the collection a material setting. Entertainment passed through workrooms, warehouses and service departments before it became something remembered at home. Reading the museum through its building brings those less visible activities into view. The site connects objects made for enjoyment with the practical work of producing, checking and caring for them.

A design question that can travel

When Nintendo announced the gallery project in 2021, it described an intention to share its product-development history and philosophy. That stated purpose offers a useful question for a museum publication: how can an object help someone understand a way of making?

For us, the productive response is to look for relationships: between a hand and a control, a character and a drawing, or a familiar pastime and a changed format. A book can hold such questions open. Its cultural interest lies partly in the opportunity to return to them, long after an anniversary has passed.