It's 'Oh yeah, Mario time', folks.
Nintendo Co. Ltd., the electronics and video game giant's first ever museum is coming up on one of its former playing card factories in Japan. The (tentatively named) Nintendo Gallery will showcase the brand's historical products, their product development history and philosophy with exhibits and experiences.
The museum is coming up in Nintendo's Kyoto-based Uji Ogura Plant which dates back to 1969, because this was where Nintendo started - creating playing cards. So it's kind of symbolic to have their first ever museum here.
Nintendo was founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi who manufactured the playing cards game Hanafuda, or 'flower cards', in Kyoto. It was in 1970s that Nintendo branched out and launched games like the Beam Gun toy line and its first video game console, the Color TV Game, and later Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. Since then, Nintendo has produced some of the most successful video consoles ever, like Nintendo DS, the Wii, Game Boy, Nintendo Switch, and created major franchises like Mario, Kirby, and Pokemon.
The museum is set to open in Nintendo's 2023 fiscal year which runs from April 2023 to March 2024. The news comes close on the heels of the opening of the Super Nintendo World theme park in Japan in March this year. We hear that several similar attractions are due to open elsewhere in Asia and the US.
Cue fans shouting, "Hui hew Just what I needed".
Mario fans can also experience those green warp pipes from a Super Mario Bros game and even drive a Mario Kart at Universal&rsquos Epic Universe, the first new theme park in Orlando in more than 20 years.
Did you know that one of the brand's most popular games involved augmented reality and some travellling and exploring We are talking about Pokémon Go, an augmented reality mobile game developed and published by Niantic in collaboration with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company for iOS and Android devices in 2016.
It had people across the world walking around streets, parks, beaches. Players had to capture exotic monsters from Pokémon with tech like location tracking and cameras. People had to visit public landmarks, and seek virtual loot and collectible characters that they try to nab.