The Nintendo Museum in Kyoto will be releasing special Pokémon-themed manhole covers featuring Pikachu. The manhole cover design features an electrified rodent jumping out of the GameBoy with pixels shooting out behind it.
Nintendo revealed a surprising new option for street decoration via an official blog post, allowing potential museum visitors to take a closer look at the design. However, Pikachu isn’t the only character in the series to get a special themed manhole cover – entire series of them have appeared in various cities across Japan, including other Pokémon like Golem and Vulpix. Nintendo even released a map showing the location of each manhole cover (dubbing them “Poké Lids”) and explaining why they exist.
“Poké Lids, a type of artistic lid for utility holes, have started popping up in some cities recently,” reads the description on the Poké Lid website. “Who knows if they have Pokémon monopoly properties? Not all utility holes seem to have them. was man-made; there were rumors that Diglit might have been responsible for digging holes large enough to be mistaken for utility holes, and some artists took it upon themselves to “mark” the cover to distinguish it from a regular cover.
Poké Lids may be an odd promotional advertisement for the Nintendo Museum, which officially opens on October 2 in Kyoto, Japan. The museum is located on land once known as the Kokura Factory, where Nintendo previously produced trading cards and provided console repair services.
Nintendo fans got their first detailed look at the museum during the Nintendo Direct in September 2023, during which it was said that the museum would display “various products from Nintendo’s history” – apparently including manholes.
