Visiting ‘Nintendo hotel’ Marufukuro was a surprisingly emotional experience

As I write this article, I’m sitting in one of the ‘Superior King’ rooms at Marufukuro, a Kyoto hotel with an important past for video game enthusiasts.

I’ve been in numerous hotels over the years, many of which have been as part of this job, but none have ever had this sort of impact on me. To cut to the chase, it’s left me a bit emotional and reflective. Yes, it’s going to be one of those deep articles, buckle up.

For those not aware of it, Marufukuro sits just off Kyoto’s Kamo river and has a rather distinctive bottle-green plaque on its outer wall, which reads ‘The Nintendo Playing Card Company’.

Nintendo was founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, who was succeeded as president in 1929 by Sekiryo Kaneda. Kaneda had married one of Yamauchi’s daughters, and was ‘adopted’ into the family and given the Yamauchi name, becoming Sekiryo Yamauchi.

In 1933, Sekiryo Yamauchi decided that Nintendo – which until then had consisted of a number of smaller offices – was growing enough as a company to warrant a new central headquarters, and so 342 Kagiyacho in the Shimogyo-ku ward, where the first Nintendo office was located, was rebuilt and became the first proper Nintendo HQ.

In 1959, Nintendo moved to a larger building and its previous headquarters was left vacant for around 60 years. That is, until Tokyo renovation company Plan Do See teamed up with architect Tadao Ando and Banjo Yamauchi – the great-great-grandson of Fusajiro Yamauchi – to convert the abandoned building into a new 5-star hotel with 18 rooms. That hotel, Marufukuro, was opened in April 2022. And now I’m sitting in it.

With its context removed, Marufukuro is still an astounding hotel and worth every one of its five stars. The rooms are spacious, which in Japan is a rarity. The complimentary amenities range from a bar area where you can pour your own drinks (it’s a good job I’m teetotal) or grab free drinks any time you feel like it. The hallways are a stunning architectural wonder of concrete and timber, and Ando’s designs – which incorporate both original and new buildings – are a beautiful mix of traditional and modern.

Last year, VGC’s Andy Robinson was lucky enough to stay in the hotel’s Japanese suite, which is an even more stunning adaptation from the original Nintendo building, featuring a traditional tatami room and even an outside bath. You can almost imagine one of the reigning Yamauchi family sipping tea here, some 80 years ago.

The building doesn’t completely ignore its past. There are playing card motifs all over the place, and there’s a beautiful library area where you can bring in your self-poured drink and choose from a selection of books on Nintendo’s history to peruse (though none of my books are here, which is frankly obscene).

The rooms themselves may be practically Nintendo-free – other than the ability to phone reception and ask to borrow a dock for your Switch – but if you want to go looking for signs of the past, the building certainly has them, even if it’s not throwing them in your face.

The staff are also extremely friendly – I didn’t tell them I was a journalist but was still taken into the main office where the team of four staff all said hello to me and asked me how I was – and my room sports easily the best shower I’ve ever had – roasting hot and a stream more powerful than a weightlifting contest on Twitch. Had this not had any links to Nintendo at all, I’d still love this place.

But it’s that connection to Nintendo that really strikes me on a personal level, and I genuinely felt a lump in my throat as I walked up to the building and saw that Nintendo Playing Card Company sign for the first time. This is the closest thing to a religious pilgrimage that many could ever have, and the many charming illustrations in the hotel’s communal guestbook further emphasise that feeling of fans coming to pay their respects.

“There are playing card motifs all over the place, and there’s a beautiful library area where you can bring in your self-poured drink and choose from a selection of books on Nintendo’s history to peruse”

As someone who’s been an avid video games enthusiast for nearly four decades now, I have a love for all the computer and console manufacturers who have contributed to this most wonderful of hobbies. But I would be lying if I said that Nintendo didn’t hold a particularly special place in my heart, for what it meant to my life and career. You never forget your first love, after all.

When I was born my dad already had an Atari 2600 and a ZX Spectrum 48K so it’s not like I was completely alien to the world of computer and video games. Quite literally, in fact: my dad regularly bought issues of Computer & Video Games (God rest it) and would read them to me. I couldn’t tell you the first game I ever played, but I can certainly tell you the first game I ever loved.

When I was 4 years old, we travelled to the US to visit my aunt, who had just moved there. It was in her apartment in Parma, Ohio in the summer of 1987 that I discovered Super Mario Bros for the first time and it quite literally Butterfly Effected the rest of my life. When I got home, Mario was all I could ever think about, and I eventually got my own NES – one of the early UK models with ‘Mattel Version’ on the cartridge flap – that Christmas. 37 years later, here I am.

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It was that love for Nintendo that blossomed into a love for video games in general. The Master System, Mega Drive, SNES, Amiga and countless others would enter my life in the years and decades that followed. I absorbed every video game magazine I could get my hands on, which in turn led to my dream to report fulltime on the games industry.

That love for Nintendo was what led to a BA Honours degree in journalism. That love for Nintendo made me leave my family and friends behind in Scotland and move to London to become a staff writer at the UK’s Official Nintendo Magazine in 2006. There I met my wife-to-be Louise – my aunt attended the wedding and our wedding present was her original NES, complete with Super Mario Bros in the cartridge slot – and eventually we moved back to Scotland and had our daughter, Serena. None of this would have happened if I turned up in Ohio and had been handed a Rubik’s Cube instead.

So to now be sitting here, in the former Nintendo headquarters, is a strangely emotional feeling, as I imagine it would be for many video game fans. This building may have been from a time when Nintendo was primarily focused on playing cards, and it may have been long abandoned and covered in cobwebs by the time the company was experimenting with its first video games, but it’s still an extremely important building from the company’s formative years.

This building doesn’t just represent Nintendo’s history – in turn, it represents my history. My entire life wouldn’t have turned out this way if this building didn’t exist. I would never have got this job, I would never have left Scotland, I would never have ended up with my wife and daughter (both of whom taught me that even my love for video games can be entirely eclipsed by something far, far greater).

In my near-20-years doing this job, the industry has changed almost beyond recognition. When I started, nobody used social media platforms. YouTubers weren’t a thing, let alone Twitch streamers. People still bought magazines in mass (which is just as well, because I was writing for one). My career has survived the birth, death, rebirth and redeath of plastic instruments. I’m now reviewing retro compilations that include games I reviewed when they were new. I’m only 41, but in terms of this job, I’m relatively old. A tired old hack, some would say.

As I sit here, in a bit of a life-full-circle moment, I know why I continue to do it. That lump in my throat when I saw the Nintendo sign is why. For all the shit that this industry throws around these days, this is still one of the greatest hobbies in existence and one that has shaped so many lives, not just mine.

“This building doesn’t just represent Nintendo’s history – in turn, it represents my history. My entire life wouldn’t have turned out this way if this building didn’t exist.”

Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to meet many readers of whatever publication I’ve been working for at the time, and hear countless stories from people who told me how games changed their lives for the better. Some of them had serious medical conditions and games helped them to forget about them, if only for a short period of much-needed relief.

Others were at a point of desperation, and a certain game, or a certain moment, or even a certain line of dialogue – Undertale’s “despite everything, it’s still you” is a common one – helped them with their struggle and gave them the mantra they needed to get through it.

Others just take pride in passing their hobby on to their children and finding a common ground they can both have fun experiencing together. I regularly bonded with my dad over discussions on the new games coming out, and earlier this year, my daughter beat her first ever Mario game, insisting I take a photo of her as she celebrated next to the Super Mario Bros Wonder credits. As if I needed to be convinced – one day when she’s older I’ll explain how Mario led to her being born. In a way that doesn’t sound as weird as that just sounded.

Marufukuro may just be a building – albeit one that’s now a really lovely, fancy hotel – but to be sitting here isn’t just a quirky “ha, guess what this used to be” gimmick.

It’s a reminder to those who visit that the people who once sat where you’re sitting would go on, through their descendants and successors, to create things that made you smile, made you laugh, put a lump in your throat, made you connect with your friends or loved ones and, in some situations, shaped your life.

I needed this.