Ahead of the opening of the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, Japan on October 2nd, gaming legend Shigeru Miyamoto spoke to reporters about the museum and Nintendo’s vision for it.
Translated via Google Translate and obtained via GAME Watch, readers can read some of the highlights of the interview below – with one of the more interesting revelations being that there are currently no plans to expand the museum to other locations in Japan or abroad.
“This was not created for business purposes, but for Nintendo employees to understand Nintendo and for the general public to learn about Nintendo. Therefore, we have no intention of spreading it to other places.”
“If anything, I’m thinking about how [Kyoto] The museum will expand in the future. For example, I decided to call this interview site an ‘art gallery’ and plan to display Mario’s drawings of Toad, terrain sketches and illustrations from the latest games ‘Splatoon’ and ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.’”
“In the future, if there are more movie titles, I would like to be able to show them somewhere. So I would like to keep up with Nintendo’s development.”
When asked about his intention to create the museum, Miyamoto had this to say:
“It would take a long time to explain… (laughs) I think everyone knows a lot about Nintendo, so you might be wondering why Nintendo made a museum, but that’s the “right answer.”
“Nintendo decided not to explain itself too much and communicate with customers through its products. So when we decided to make a museum this time, I thought Yamauchi (third president Hiroshi Yamauchi) would be here, saying, ‘Stop doing things like that.'”
“First of all, various materials remained for several years. In particular, arcade games are pointless if they don’t work, but they are very difficult to keep in working order. Also, hundreds of games are released every year, including those from licensees, but there’s no point in leaving the bundles there. It was said that it had to be solved somehow.”
“…As a result of various discussions, we decided to leave all Nintendo’s past assets and use them to let people know what Nintendo is, so that not only our employees, but three generations of parents and children can understand what Nintendo is. “
“So I don’t want Nintendo to get involved in the ‘game console war’ – the ‘what to do with this high-spec hardware’ competition (laughs). Nintendo will continue to create things that are unique to Nintendo, and we will continue to make not only games, but also videos, and we want people to know that we are a company that creates a variety of entertainment content, so we created a museum.”
And when asked about the image of the company that Miyamoto would like Nintendo to have in the future, he responded with this:
“Right now there is an exhibition of characters outside the venue, and many of the characters will meet you at the entrance on the first floor. Originally, we did not think about this kind of exhibition, but we thought about exhibiting our previous products and hardware. However, we decided that if we wanted people to understand Nintendo as a whole, it would be best for them to see our IP, so we switched to this type of exhibition.”
“Now we want people to know about the IP and come back to Nintendo games. IP, theme parks and movies move as a gateway to Nintendo games. Looking further into the future, there will be a big brand that includes the ‘Nintendo’ IP, and while within that of course there will be games, if we can gradually create more engaging things, I think we’ll see a lot of things other than games coming.”
“After all, IP is what people remember well. When a new version of the game is released, it stops working. It’s very sad, and the things we create will gradually only be playable on virtual console, and there’s a limit to how many you can play in museums. On the other hand, there are people who continue to watch movies no matter how much time passes, so that’s one of the reasons why I started doing video works.”
“I think Nintendo as a whole will become a big brand as there is more content like this. I topic is ‘creating a reason to choose Nintendo.’ For example, if a child becomes a first grader, instead of ‘buy him a Nintendo game’ as a reward, I would say ‘buy him something from Nintendo’ other than the game. I think it would be good to live in a world like this.”
