BODY: If you have ever wanted to see the inside of a Famicom cartridge enlarged to the size of a vinyl record sleeve, Nintendo has made a book for you.
On October 2, Nintendo released "Family Computer / Nintendo Entertainment System," a hardware visual book sold through Bonus Stage, the shop inside the Nintendo Museum in Uji, Kyoto. The volume runs 168 pages at roughly 30cm by 30cm โ closer to an art monograph than a game guide โ and is given over almost entirely to photography of the 1983 console and the ecosystem that grew around it.
The selling point is the depth of the catalogue. Alongside the console and its famous rubber-pad controllers, the book documents peripherals including the Family Computer Robot (R.O.B. to Western players), and goes as far as comparison photographs of software circuit boards โ the bare PCBs pulled from cartridges, shot side by side so readers can see how Nintendo's board revisions and mapper chips changed across the machine's lifespan. That is a level of detail usually reserved for enthusiast wikis and teardown forums, not official publications.
The title's pairing of the Japanese Famicom with the NES signals coverage of both machines, though the text itself is Japanese-only. Nintendo has not announced an English edition. Distribution is wider than the museum gift shop alone: the book is also listed at Amazon, Rakuten, DMM and Yahoo! in Japan, which spares overseas buyers the museum's ticket lottery.
The insider take
The October 2 release date is not a coincidence โ it is the Nintendo Museum's own anniversary, the day the Uji site opened to the public in 2024. Nintendo has quietly been using Bonus Stage as a publishing arm, and the pattern matters: museum-shop goods in Japan tend to print once, sell through, and then live on the resale market at two or three times retail. The simultaneous online listing is the real news here, and a sign Nintendo learned from the scalping that followed its earlier museum exclusives. For hardware historians, a 30cm page is the whole point: Famicom board photography has circulated for decades as murky forum scans, and this is the first time the company itself has shot it properly.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).