The best destinations for Nintendo fans around the world

From a lottery-access museum in Nintendo's original factory to Donkey Kong Country at Universal's newest U.S. theme park

Credit: Nintendo Museum

Video game franchises have inspired merchandise and licensing deals for decades, but Nintendo has done something more ambitious: it has built a physical world. The company’s most beloved characters now inhabit theme parks, flagship stores, and a museum housed in the factory where Nintendo made its earliest products. These are not pop-up experiences or temporary installations. They are permanent, purpose-built destinations designed around the specific pleasure of encountering Mario, Donkey Kong, and the rest of the Nintendo universe in three dimensions.

The appeal extends well beyond children. Nintendo’s catalog spans generations in the most literal sense: adults who grew up with the original Game Boy now bring their own children to these destinations, and the franchise’s staying power means that the cultural references land across age groups in a way that more recent entertainment properties cannot match. A parent who spent childhood hours on Super Mario Bros. and a teenager who plays Nintendo Switch today share enough common ground that a Nintendo destination works as a family experience in both directions simultaneously.

The destinations below appear in Travel Leisure, ranging from a museum accessible only by lottery to theme park lands that rank among the most technically ambitious attractions built in recent years. The selection covers Japan and the United States, reflecting where Nintendo has concentrated its physical presence. Each destination offers something distinct: the museum tells the company’s history, the stores carry exclusive merchandise unavailable elsewhere, and the theme park worlds put visitors inside the games themselves.

1. Nintendo Museum occupies the factory where the company began

Credit: Nintendo Museum

The Nintendo Museum opened in October 2024 inside the company’s former Uji Ogura Plant, a facility located roughly 13 miles south of Kyoto City that Nintendo used before the company shifted its manufacturing operations. The building’s history predates the video game era entirely: Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a maker of hanafuda, traditional Japanese flower playing cards, and the museum traces that origin before moving through the decades of game hardware and software that brought the company to its current global position. Three buildings contain the exhibits, giving the museum a physical scope that matches the breadth of the history it covers.

The Craft & Play exhibit lets visitors make their own hanafuda cards, connecting the contemporary audience to the product that Nintendo produced for its first several decades of existence. The gesture is specific enough to feel meaningful rather than decorative: making the cards by hand gives the company’s origin story a tactile reality that display cases alone cannot provide. The Discover $DFS area, which displays every Nintendo release across the company’s history, functions as the centerpiece for visitors whose connection to Nintendo begins with the video game era rather than the playing card period.

Demand for tickets has made access the primary challenge the museum presents. The lottery system for purchasing tickets reflects visitor interest at a level the physical space cannot accommodate through open sales, and the process requires advance planning that international visitors need to factor into trip timelines. The museum is currently accepting entries for July 2026 tickets, and its official website provides the most current information on the lottery schedule. The difficulty of obtaining tickets has not diminished the museum’s reputation as the definitive Nintendo destination for serious fans, and the Uji location, accessible from Kyoto, fits naturally into a Japan itinerary built around the Kyoto-Osaka corridor.

The factory setting gives the museum a specificity that a purpose-built institution would lack. Visiting the building where Nintendo actually made things, now converted into a space that explains what those things were and how they led to what followed, provides a connection between........

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