Let’s talk about how we talk about Nintendo’s Love Hotels.

Hello you exceptionally wonderful Patreon people!
I hope that all of you are doing fantastic, that your favorite video game gets a surprise sequel announced today and that everything you ever hoped for spontaneously comes to fruition!

The video about beating Galaxy crouching and the history of Mario Odyssey's speedrunning are out and I’m quite happy with how both of them turned out.

Producing the Odyssey video has been a bit of a headache (it took me lots of rewrites) but I’m glad that it all resulted in something remotely watchable!

But that’s not the topic of today's little post.

Let’s talk about something else for once.

Let’s talk about Nintendo’s love hotels.

Or let’s talk about how we talk about Nintendo’s love hotels to be precise!
Does this make sense?
Not in the slightest?

Well, just you wait.

So did you know that before Nintendo became a gaming company they actually tried out many different and weird business ventures.

In the 60’s Nintendo sold instant rice, they had a taxi business going for a while, they manufactured a love tester - that reliably was able to figure out whether two people were in love - and most interestingly of all, they also briefly ran a Love Hotel.

Here’s a kotaku article talking about these hotels.

Here is an article by Nintendo wire. 

Here is an article about it by nintendolink.

It even made it onto my Austrian local news.

There are countless YouTube videos about these love hotels and even more reddit threats, there are articles and twitter write ups - it’s just a well known fact of the internet.

So given how popular this story is you probably have heard about it before, but for the unlucky few that have been able to escape this little tidbit of Nintendo history so far, let’s talk about Love Hotels.

And by love hotels I mean the history of housing in Japan.

You see, Japan is actually a rather small island all things considered.

A small island with a population north of 120 million people nowadays.

There is just not much space per person in Japan.

Because of this Japanese families have traditionally been living in rather small, multi generational houses or tiny apartments.

Apartments with thin walls.

And they already did so after the second world war.

Which brings us to a problem.

You see, tiny apartments and small, thin walled multi generational houses may be a great way to live if you are a society recovering from the terrors of the second world war, they are however a terrible place if you are a young couple looking to spend some private hours together.

Japan's unusual housing structure just had the side consequence that it was almost impossible for many young couples to have sex in privacy.

And thus capitalism cast its magic spell and came up with a commercial solution.

By the 1960’s all over Japan so called Love Hotels were popping up.

Love Hotels that offer hourly rented rooms in very discreet settings providing couples with a private place to have some fun together.

And these Love Hotels never got away.

To this day they are a staple in Japanese dating culture.

Just to give you an idea of how common these places are: In 2009 the annual revenue of the Love Hotel industry in Japan was estimated to be roughly 40 billion dollars.

The entire Japanese video games industry is expected to have a revenue of 31,5 billion dollars in 2026.

Awesome, so Love Hotels are something very common in Japan and Nintendo dabbled into this business back in the 60’s before they settled for the less profitable video games industry instead.

More on this in a second but first we have to meet a friendly fellow.

David Sheff.

David Sheff is an American writer who is best known for his publications in outlets like Playboy magazine and Rolling Stone.

Why is this Playboy author of interest for us?
Well, because in 1993 he released a very interesting book.

A book that had passages of it pre printed in men's health magazine and playboy.

A book crucial to our conversation about how we converse about Nintendo’s Love Hotels.

A book called: “Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children”.

So first: yes.

That title slaps.

But that is not the only interesting thing about this book.

You see the book is retelling the early history of Nintendo. 

And during the process of writing the book David Sheff actually conducted several interviews with very important people at Nintendo including former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi and Shigeru Miyamoto.

Try to remember former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi - we will learn spicy details about his marriage in a moment, but back to “Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children”

You see, even though the book ended up misspelling Shigeru Miyamoto’s name it nonetheless revealed a lot of fascinating information.

Because 1993’s “Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children” is actually the only primary source on Nintendo’s Love Hotels in existence.

It is this book that revealed this shocking piece of Nintendo trivia to the world.

And it did so in a single paragraph.

Here it is!

Let’s do a reading of this historic document together.

This is it.

This is where all the fuzz comes from.

This is the only primary source in all of the internet mentioning Nintendo’s Love Hotels.

All the articles, YouTube videos, twitter threats and reddit posts we took a look at before are based on this single paragraph of “Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children”.

And this is where things become really interesting, because get ready for a plot twist!

Here is an article by real-otaku-gamer, claiming that the love hotels have been nothing but a myth.

Here is gonintendo claiming the same.

Here are people debating the fact that Nintendo never ran love hotels on reddit, here is a youtube video disputing the myth.

Even Gemini tells us nowadays that Nintendo’s Love Hotels are nothing but an urban legend.

Oh, dear!
What had happened?

Well, this here had happened.

A japanese blogger released a blogpost on famicons.net.

A blogpost revealing the truth about Nintendo’s love hotels.

Here’s what famicons.net did!

The blogger reached out to Isao Yamazaki who is the Author of another history book on Nintendo asking them what they know about Nintendo’s love hotels, only to receive a shocking answer.

Yamazaki believes the Love Hotels to be a myth.

Why?

Well, because he took a look into the public filings that Nintendo (as a publicly traded company) has to release quarterly and couldn’t find any hints of a love hotel business in those filings.

Case closed!

Turns out Nintendo’s Love Hotels are nothing more than a fun made up legend.

And with this we can finally waffle about the thing I actually want to waffle about!
You see, all the YouTube videos, the news articles, the reddit posts and tik-tok shorts about Nintendo running Love Hotels are all fundamentally based on one throwaway paragraph in a book about Nintendo from 1993 written by a pop culture writer.

And all those articles, videos and AI expertise that nowadays claim that the Love Hotels are nothing more than an urban legend are all based upon a Japanese blog post that claims to have talked to a Nintendo researcher that claims to have found nothing about this in Nintendo's public filings.

And as it turns out both of these things are terrible primary sources.

David Sheff probably picked up this story somewhere when he was doing interviews with various Nintendo employees, but these might have misremembered the Love Hotels as well.

Maybe the Love Hotels were already an urban myth that was spreading within Nintendo in the 90s.

Maybe someone really didn’t like Yamauchi and made up the story of him cheating on his wife for some reason.

Maybe the story was about another company and Sheff got his facts confused.

Or maybe Yamauchi himself told the story and all of it is one hundred percent true.

There is simply no way to know with certainty.

But the same is true for the blogpost that actually disproofs the urban legend.

So first the person claiming to not have found anything about this in Nintendo’s public filings may simply have overlooked it - company filings aren’t exactly fun to read.

This person might even wrongfully claim to have looked into it but never did for all we know.

But much more reasonable: Nintendo might have run the Hotels before 1962 (the year they became publicly traded) in which case no public filings would exist.

Something that the very blog post takes into consideration but that is lost to all the articles and videos talking about how the Love Hotels are nothing more than an urban myth.

So on the one hand we have tons of coverage of a throwaway line in a pop culture book that might be wrong and on the other hand we have tons of coverage about a blog post that itself acknowledges that it can’t really prove its claim with certainty.

All the discussion on the internet that took place the past three decades about Nintendo’s Love Hotels is reducible to this single paragraph and this lonely blog post.

Why is this noteworthy?

Well, because not only the conversation about Nintendo’s Love Hotels works like this online but almost all of gaming discourses works like this.

It’s something most people never notice, but once you get an eye for it you all of a sudden start to see it everywhere.

Most of the time when there is a discussion about an unbelievable urban myth in gaming we are talking about nothing more than a blog post or a youtube video, most of the time when we are talking about how gamers are outraged about whatever gamers are outraged today it often boils down to nothing more than a reddit thread or a bunch of tweets and so on.

Public Games discussions are often less discussing news and more of a feedback loop in which twitter, tik-tok, newssites and youtubers turn up the volume louder and louder the more they talk about a thing.

A thing that often is barely a thing to begin with.

So as a small tip, the next time there are tons of articles in the games world popping up about something marvelous, it is always a good idea to first check what the primary source for all this discussion is.

Chances are you’ll be surprised how little can cause huge discussions.

Cool.

So did Nintendo ever run Love Hotels?

Well … here is a terrible title for a YouTube video:

“We still don’t know if Nintendo ever ran Love Hotels.”

It is certainly in the realm of possibility.

David Sheff somehow picked up this information but it is impossible for us to really confirm it since we can’t track down his sources anymore.

We simply do not know.

Personally however … I actually think it is more likely that it happened than the other way around.

Awesome!

So that was all that I wanted to waffle about today.

Before we wrap this up however - as always, a gigantic thank you to all of you for your incredible support.

All of you are incredible and I hope you know it!

Let’s talk about how we talk about Nintendo’s Love Hotels. (YouTube)