Here’s what the first Nintendo building looked like 129 years ago

While Nintendo has been fairly innovative with their consoles, their official buildings are a bit less exciting. The present-day Nintendo headquarters is a concrete block tiled with square windows and a Nintendo logo. The official development building isn’t much different.

But when the company first opened up 129 years ago, it wasn’t a big square building.

Present-day Nintendo Headquarters, Kyoto:

Nintendo Official Development Building:

The original Nintendo building, which opened up in 1889, featured classic Kyoto architecture with wooden walls. French video game historian Florent Gorges‏ shared one of the earliest pictures of the original Nintendo building on Twitter.

Back then, Nintendo wasn’t shipping consoles or making video games. The company was all about hanafuda playing cards, which is noted in the building’s sign in Japanese. The building’s architecture was a standard for the time.

The present-day Nintendo headquarters is not built atop the location of the original, but Nintendo does still own the original space. The original Nintendo headquarters was ‘preserved in concrete,’ according to Gorges, in 1933. The wooden storefront remained until the late 90’s. In the early 2000’s, the remaining pieces storefront was removed.

Not very many people have entered the original Nintendo building, but one man did some trespassing and got a tour of some of the building out of it.