BODY: If you have ever wanted to see the Family Computer Robot photographed like a museum piece, Nintendo has made a book for you โ and it is sitting on a shelf in Uji, Kyoto.
On October 2, Nintendo began selling "Family Computer / Nintendo Entertainment System" at Bonus Stage, the gift shop inside the Nintendo Museum. It is a hardcover visual book with a dust jacket, running 168 pages at roughly 30cm ร 30cm โ about the size of a vinyl LP sleeve, and far larger than the usual game-history paperback.
The contents are photography-led rather than text-led. Preview pages show the Famicom and its North American counterpart, the NES, shot in detail alongside their accessories, including side-by-side comparisons of internal game boards and a spread on the Family Computer Robot, the short-lived 1985 peripheral known overseas as R.O.B. The framing is closer to an industrial-design catalogue than a nostalgia album: hardware as object, lit and cropped to show seams, textures and molding.
Nintendo has not announced a price or a general bookstore release, and for now the title is positioned as a museum-shop item. That matters more than it sounds, because Bonus Stage is inside the paid museum, which still runs on an advance-reservation lottery system.
The insider take
The Nintendo Museum opened on October 2, 2024, so this release lands exactly on its second anniversary โ a tidy bit of Kyoto scheduling that Nintendo rarely explains but almost never does by accident. The bigger story for overseas fans is the shape of Nintendo's publishing strategy: the company has quietly turned its museum shop into a channel for the kind of archival material it would never put in a normal retail book program, where print runs, returns and licensing all get complicated. The result is genuinely excellent documentation of hardware history that is also, functionally, a souvenir โ obtainable only by winning a reservation slot and travelling to Uji. Expect proxy-buying services and resale listings to do brisk business within the week, and expect the book itself to be the best-looking Famicom reference most people will never hold.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).