Until recently Nintendo didn’t operate their own stores — at least, not in the US — but now they have two: one in New York City and one in San Francisco. After the initial opening crowds died down a little, I went to check out the SF store on a weekday afternoon.
Directly across the cable car tracks from Union Square, the company’s iconic red and white branding stands out on a storefront in the corner of the Westin St. Francis building.
Going in, I correctly assumed the store’s focus would be on Nintendo’s kid-friendly, nostalgic characters and franchises. What I didn’t expect is how much of the store would be toys and merchandise: perhaps only a quarter of the floor space was devoted to actual games.
Some of the plushies are pretty adorable though, I gotta admit.
That said, there are a number of TVs with Nintendo Switch 2 consoles plugged into them in the basement level, along with a large projector screen for party games.
A few nods to the past were on display including the Virtual Boy headset, now in the form factor of a Google Cardboard style case you can strap your Switch 2 into. Whether or not the headache-inducing Virtual Boy games are worth revisiting is a separate issue.
One thing I got a kick out of was a Super Mario Bros. wall calendar, which instantly seemed familiar to me. It wasn’t until later that I remembered that for a couple years I had a Nintendo calendar; not specific to the Mario franchise, as it also included art from other big games at the time like Punch Out.
I can understand why Nintendo isn’t using this showroom-style store to dwell on the past too much — particularly since their history of gambling and sex hotels doesn’t exactly align with their post-1980 family friendly image — but it would have been fun to see a vintage Donkey Kong arcade machine or even some Game & Watch units on display.
