Back in 2021, Nintendo announced that it was building a museum-style facility, then called the “Nintendo Gallery”, on the site of its Uji Ogura Plant in Kyoto, with expectations that construction would be finished in March 2024. The building work on the site — since given the official title Nintendo Museum — looked to be on course from the outside, but it seems the museum will miss its target completion date by a month or so.
The construction notice displayed at the site, as captured below by @hanayohaneNEKO on Twitter (thanks, Kyotogamer), now lists the completion date as 30th April. It’s unclear how long this notice update has been up, but it does appear that the museum won’t quite be ready for the end of March.
When first announced, the project was “expected to be completed within [Nintendo’s] 2023 Fiscal Year, which ends in March 2024.” It’s not a huge delay, and the company has yet to make any announcement regarding an official opening date for the museum.
Details regarding exactly what will be on display are thin on the ground, too. Previous press releases detail an intention to share “product development history and philosophy with the public.”
Nintendo’s historical products will be showcased, and exhibits and experiences will be available…
It’s tantalising stuff for Nintendo lifers, and we’re eager to hear more about how the company will be highlighting its game-making heritage. The various Super Nintendo Worlds do a fine job of bringing the Mushroom Kingdom alive with rides and fun (not to mention fulfilling the merch quota); with this, we’ve got our fingers crossed for deep-dive exhibits exploring hardware and development history and the people behind some of the greatest video games ever made.
What do you think will be on display at the Nintendo Museum? Playable prototypes? Pre-release hardware variants? Developer headshots with a bit of blurb? We’ll find out soon — just not quite as soon as we’d hoped.