BODY: A hardware book about the Famicom, printed at roughly the size of a vinyl LP sleeve, and you can only buy it in one building in Kyoto. That's the deal Nintendo quietly announced on October 1 and put on shelves the very next day.
The book is titled simply Family Computer / Nintendo Entertainment System, and it went on sale October 2 at Bonus Stage, the shop inside the Nintendo Museum in Uji, Kyoto. Nintendo describes it as a visual book: approximately 30cm × 30cm, 168 pages, and built almost entirely around photography rather than prose.
From the sample pages Nintendo shared through the museum's official X account, the photography leans unusually technical for an official Nintendo publication. One spread lines up bare cartridge circuit boards side by side — the kind of comparison normally found in hobbyist teardown blogs, not a first-party art book. Peripherals get their own coverage too, including the Family Computer Robot, better known outside Japan as R.O.B., the accessory that shipped with the NES Deluxe Set and then vanished almost immediately.
The volume ships with a dust jacket carrying the familiar red-and-white Famicom logo. Nintendo has not announced a price, an English edition, or any plan to sell the book outside the museum shop — and as of publication it isn't listed through Nintendo's online store or general retailers.
The insider take
The October 2 timing is not a coincidence: the Nintendo Museum opened its doors on October 2, 2024, so this is an anniversary release dressed up as a routine shop restock. That matters because of how the museum works. Entry is by advance application with a lottery-style draw, slots fill months out, and foreign visitors routinely discover that "just dropping by Uji" isn't an option. A museum-exclusive book is therefore functionally a limited edition, and Japanese collectors know the drill — expect copies on Mercari and Yahoo Auctions at a healthy markup within days. If you have a trip to Kansai planned, the move is to secure museum tickets first and worry about the book second.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).