Looks great, I did wish there would be sections for their top franchises where they can show early sketches and thoughts. A bit more bite into the software side. Or even hardware designs. It seems like an entertainment museum not much of to get out of it.
Agreed. Gaf seems pretty lukewarm on this thing and it is not difficult to see why. I don't like the style and presentation of things like this, seems very ultramodern (in the worst way) and antiseptic - the archaic "old Nintendo building" (which most visitors seemed to be denied entry to anyway) had so much more character than this.
The museum may well have a lot of other interesting exhibits to show off, but what is seen here seems very basic. Now this is coming from me, a pretty bonafide retro nerd, so I understand that this is much more tourist (and child) centric than really trying to cater to middle-aged enthusiasts, "but still!" The Before Mario blog has a wealth of items and I imagine you can only see a few such things at a place like this (behind glass no less).
Legit insight into the early game (and toy) development would be just.. AWESOME. I would love to see ancient development hardware (actually running!?), old documentation, level and layout designs on graph paper, character art and concept sketches. There's a whole wealth of available material from the old Game & Watches that would just be so incredible to see, the early oversized wooden prototypes, things like that. Clippings from ancient magazines (I'd love to see how the early Nintendo Power mags were made - what about all the physical 3D models and funky original artwork created for the mag), and then as for hardware. What did the earlier Virtual Boy prototypes look like, what about when it was originally a color device? How about the AVS (early prototype for Western Market NES before it got significantly retooled). How about display props from Space World? Unreleased prototypes of games? The 2D 8bit stye game that was created internally to guide early development of Breath of the Wild? The early versions of 8bit Zelda? You think they would have much of ANY of this stuff?
Sorry to rant. I just think it is such a waste of a massive opportunity to delve into the fantastic history of one of the mega-brands of the entire world of videogames and what the potential is VS what we get is night and day. I wouldn't want to visit a place like this if it was up the street from me, I know it sounds harsh but that is my bias as an older gamer who was absolutely intoxicated with this stuff in my youth.
