Museum wants to show you what Nintendo’s video game stars looked like before they every showed up your screen.

One of the coolest parts of the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto is the display of boxes for video games released for the company’s various home and handheld systems. Stretching back decades, the collection consists of hundreds of pieces of game-related artwork which often served as the first impression fans got when seeing the games on the shelf of a game shop or friend’s house.

The cover art, though, is just a single piece. Nintendo’s artists and designers create far more illustrations than that during the planning and production of a title, and now the Nintendo Museum has begun giving visitors a look at some of their amazing artwork that didn’t show up on the box.

On September 3, the Nintendo Museum announced that it has added an Art Gallery section the second floor of the facility. The preview photo, released above, is cagily presented in such a way that it’s hard to clearly see the illustrations (thus encouraging people to come to the museum), but several pieces of color artwork for the original Legend of Zelda Famicom/NES game can be seen at the edge of the middle wall. These appear to be large versions of illustrations that appeared in the game’s manual, perhaps even the original drawings, and Nintendo’s statement that “Visitors can explore a wide range of game artwork, including character illustrations and concept art” implies that the Art Gallery will have pre-production artwork as well.

In addition to Zelda, Nintendo specifically mentions Super Mario and Animal Crossing in its announcement for the Art Gallery. Given how many long-running series the company has with highly developed visual designs, its archives no doubt contain far more artwork than the museum can display at any one time, so maybe it’ll rotate pieces in and out to coincide with the release of new franchise installments or release-date anniversaries.

Don’t forget, though, that admission to the Nintendo Museum is by advance reservation only, with applications for the next available block of tickets, for visits in December, going on through the museum website now.

Related: Nintendo Museum official website
Source: Nintendo Museum, Twitter/@Museum_Nintendo
Images: Nintendo Museum
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