Nintendo KidZania
Image: Nintendo Life

If you've never stumbled across one before, KidZania is a strange concept. This is a child-sized indoor city full of ultrarealistic role-playing opportunities for kids to try out different careers, make money (only to be used in the attraction, we might add) and get a taste of adult life.

The available career experiences vary across the 26 KidZania sites worldwide, though they always tend to offer a broad spectrum covering everything from a doctor to a TV presenter. What we didn't realise, however, is that two of Japan's KidZania sites (Tokyo and Koshien) have teamed up with Nintendo to offer a 'Game Developer' experience for its young attendees.

These Nintendo booths actually opened back in 2022, though we hadn't heard of their existence until they were recently brought to our attention on Twitter by Salt and Sacrifice developer Shane Lynch.

The Nintendo experience lets kids develop their own game (via Game Builder Garage) before presenting it to their peers. Lynch also notes that those who complete the job role-play take home an empty Switch game case with their game title on it. Sweet!

It's the kind of thing that we can see our younger selves going crazy over. KidZania is still yet to 'break' Europe — the continent's last standing site is in Lisbon, Portugal, after the London branch was suddenly closed at the start of this year — and there is just the one Dallas site in North America, though the brand can be found all over the world with other branches in Mexico, Egypt, India and more.

Now, where's the 'Grown-UpZania' so we can pretend to be Nintendo devs for the day?

What do you make of this Nintendo KidZania experience? Have you been lucky enough to try it out? Let us know in the comments.

[source x.com]