Nintendo Related Japan Trip Notes

The original wooden 1889
building.

Near the end of Summer 2024, I finally got to return to Japan and take my family with me. One of the purposes we accomplished was to make a “pilgrimage” of sorts to the Nintendo Headquarters. Because of that trip (along with some helpful websites), I was able to get a far better picture of the history of the company. This post is a summary of my thoughts and what I learned.

 

 

The "left" part of the original
1889 building next to 
the 1933 building. 

I had known for quite a while that Nintendo was started in the late 1800’s as a playing card company, but until I had watched a documentary called Playing with Power (narrated by Sean Astin) about it I didn’t really grasp or appreciate the history. 

 

 

 

 

The 1933 building, which
extends down the block.

The Marufuku Nintendo Card Co., or Yamauchi Nintendo Karuta as it was originally known in Japanese, was founded 23 Sept 1889 in a small wood building in Kyoto, where they made Hanafuda cards which got around the government rules of “Western” cards intended for gambling. As their operation expanded, they built a white brick building with green trim directly adjacent to the original wooden building in 1933.

 

 

 

Eventually the scattered offices were consolidated in a new building in 1959 in Kyoto (which has now become the new Nintendo Museum). By this time the major focus of the company was making toys and board games, though they still made hanafuda as well as themed western decks of cards. The original buildings were abandoned, but still remained standing. The 1933 building is now the Marufuku Hotel which displays Nintendo history, and the original wood building was torn down in 2004 to become a parking lot, and eventually the land was used to add an annex to the hotel. It’s a shame that I didn’t make the trip here when I was in Japan in the late 90’s to see the building myself. Finally, in 2000 their current headquarters buildings were built – two white square-ish buildings about a block from each other in downtown Kyoto. 

 

As part of our trip, we walked to the Marufuku Hotel and took some pictures outside of the building, and then walked around the current headquarters, though we were not permitted to enter any of the buildings. After that, we did, however, go to the official Nintendo Store in a Kyoto mall where I bought some plastic hanafuda cards. 

 

 

Unfortunately, we were unable to go to the Nintendo Museum. Though it was projected to be done in March of 2024, it wasn't finished until around September. Additionally, tickets are distributed in a lottery system so even if it was open there was a chance we wouldn't have gotten to go anyway.  

 

How I Spend time, or Why I'm a Console Peasant

Some conversations I’ve had recently have made me reflect on priorities and how I want to spend my time. Because gaming consoles (and their controllers) are designed to mainly play games, in almost all instances they are pretty much traditionally plug-n-play and easy to use. Excluding cases when additional hardware is needed (4-player adapters, peripheral controllers, VR headsets, etc.) or modern games that require large downloads, pretty much all you needed to do was pop in the cartridge/disc, turn on the TV, and pick up the controller.

But with PC gaming, it often requires checking on system requirements, configuring hardware, and potentially other tasks like moving files. To be fair, platforms/launchers like Steam have made things far easier than it was when I was trying to get WarCraft II to connect to my friend’s computer over a dial-up modem in high school.

What I’m getting at is that while, yes, a PC can potentially have better screen resolutions, better frame rates, and other visual fidelity enhancements over consoles, it requires more time/effort (and often more cash for a better CPU/GPU or larger monitor) than a console does and it’s not something that I really want to spend my time or money doing. If I am chasing the “best possible experience” with regards to graphics, I would be upgrading my hardware on a yearly basis and using all of my budgeted hobby money to do so.

The reason I play games is to spend time having fun, and I want to maximize my priorities to do exactly that, so I want to spend as little time as possible in configuration menus and hardware optimization. I don’t want to spend more time researching/learning about games than I spend actually playing them, nor do I want to spend time/money on something and take weeks to get it set up and never actually play the games I’m intending to play. I admit there is a satisfying feeling of relief knowing that I have the capability to play something (because I have it installed on my 3DS or bought an N64 Flashcart), but if I never actually get around to playing it, what good does it do? 

 

I also don’t want to bankrupt myself in the process, so I don’t need to have the bleeding edge of technology to accomplish this goal. Basically, I’m trying to maximize playing time while minimizing cost and other considerations like fiddling around with settings. Does that mean I won’t have the absolute best possible experience? Yes, but it’s about 95% as good in my estimation, and that’s good enough for me. I believe that the law of diminishing returns applies here, where spending $500 will get you 92% of your goal, and spending another $500 will only get you an additional 3 to 4%. Everyone has a threshold for “good enough,” and mine is low enough that console gaming is fine even if I don’t have 120 fps and VRR. Sometimes the frame rate may stutter a little, or load times might be a bit longer, but at the end of the day, I just ask if the game playable and did I have a good time playing it. It is said that the pursuit of perfection is the enemy of the progress (or in this case, the “good enough”). I would rather play 30 games over the course of a year that are rated good to excellent rather than play only 2 games that are perfect (or put another way, I would rather play 30 games that run pretty well that are fun than play only 2 games that run perfectly). 

Would I like to have the best possible experience playing a game? Again, sure, but if I can achieve 95% of that right now with no additional cost/effort/time but it’ll take hundreds of dollars and hours of my time downloading mods/updates and needing to tinker with settings just to get it to 98%, then it’s not worth it to me.

As an alternative example, would I like to watch movies on a 50-foot screen with perfect sound quality and nobody else around other than my wife? Sure. But I don’t want to spend the money to rent out a theater or buy a big enough house build my own private theater every time I want to watch a movie. Instead, I can spend no additional money to watch my 46” TV from 2012 while lying on my couch and not have to put up with other people in a theater, and that’s good enough, even without modern enhancements like HDR. When my TV finally goes kaput, then yeah, I'll get something that is far more capable than my current setup. But I don't see the utility of replacing a piece of equipment that is still functioning as intended. 

 

There are occasions where I will do some of this kind of thing. I spent the better part of a summer trying to get a Philips CD-i emulator to run so I could get a chance to play the Unholy Triforce of Zelda games. It never ran perfectly and would crash during the infamous cut scenes, so the work-around was to skip them and watch them on YouTube at the appropriate times. But once I had it running enough where I could experience the game (mostly) as intended, then I was satisfied and haven't really touched it since, having achieved my goal of playing all of the Zelda spinoff games. 

Also, for what it's worth, I did use a few emulators like ZSNES on the computer somewhat frequently because they required almost no configuration and worked without too much effort. Later emulators for the N64 required more work so I didn't use them except for a few times to see how well they perform. And when it comes to the hacking scene for the 3DS, most of the work was done for me and I just had to follow basic instructions to get it work.  

To summarize, I think everyone has differently optimized priorities (“different strokes for different folks”), and mine includes frugality so I don’t feel the need to run out and upgrade my hardware until it’s absolutely necessary as long as the length of play, the ability to play the game, and the amount of fun that can be had outweighs the amount of time/effort/cost to actually play it.