Here’s a look at the Nintendo Museum’s giant controllers, Super Scope shooting gallery, and more

Nintendo’s 135-year history will soon be brought to life inside the walls of a new purpose-built Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, Tokyo – and ahead of its opening on October 2, legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed some of his interesting exhibits in a new video tour.

The Nintendo Museum is built on the site of the factory where Nintendo originally made its Hanafuda cards, and which was later used for quality checks during the Famicom era. However, that building and its modest carpark no longer stand, replaced by a dazzling two-floor monument to Nintendo’s history and a Mario-themed plaza.

Miyamoto’s 13 minute tour The tour begins on the museum’s second floor, where several huge curved glass displays – featuring many of the products released by Nintendo since its founding in 1889 – can be found. This entire area is meant to show the evolution of Nintendo’s approach to entertainment, from its early non-video game products – including copy machines, baby strollers, RC cars and pitching machines – to more familiar territory, starting with the earliest video games from 1977, the Color TV-Game 6 and Color TV-Game 15.

From there, the video game content begins in earnest, with Miyamoto highlighting exhibits showcasing various iterations of Nintendo’s games and consoles from around the world, demonstrating how the graphics of its most beloved franchises have changed over the years, the evolution of ?blocks, the history of titles played with the whole body, and more. It’s a fair bit of (presumably educational) nostalgia, but the coolest stuff seems reserved for the museum’s first floor.

Here, Nintendo has created eight activities reimagining some of its earliest products for the modern age. There’s a giant screen on the floor where visitors can play the traditional Japanese card game Hyakunin Isshu using a smart device, and reconstructions of Japanese houses where guests can pick up a foam baseball bat and try to knock balls away from the Ultra Machine DX pitching machine – the twist is that objects in the room come to life, bottles spin and printers print lines as balls bounce off of them.

Then there’s the Zapper and Scope SP exhibit, inspired by Nintendo’s laser clay bowling alley shooting gallery of the ’70s. This reimagining of the experience sees 13 players – armed with either the NES Zapper or the SNES Super Scope – destroy Mario-themed targets while people like the Shy Guys and Koopas dance and spin around on a giant horizontal screen, all in a battle for the highest score. And Miyamoto’s final video tour stop takes him to a room where guests can play classic Nintendo games from the Famicon to the Wii eras – but only using comically huge controllers that require multiple people to coordinate their inputs.

And that’s alongside other interactive experiences that aren’t shown in Nintendo’s video, but A brief description is given on its websiteWhich includes exhibits inspired by the Ultra Hand, Love Tester, Game & Watch and more. Other activities include an area for playing Hanafuda, workshops where guests can create their own Hanafuda cards, a cafe and a shop selling exclusive merchandise.

The Nintendo Museum will open in Kyoto, Tokyo on October 2nd, and tickets – if you’re lucky and can get there – are available for purchase here. Reserved NowExpect to pay 3,300 yen (around £17) for adults, while various concessions are available for teenagers, children and pre-schoolers.