Nintendo Gateway System & LodgeNet: Nintendo on Airplanes and in Hotels

Console Name: Nintendo Gateway System Release Date: July 1993 Original Price: $4,000 per seat Country of Origin: United States of America Manufacturer: Nintendo Discontinued In: 2008 (official site) / 2013 (last hotels) Related to: FamicomBox Super Famicom Box

 

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History
The history of the Nintendo Gateway System can be traced back to 1921, when the first movie was shown on an airplane. Titled Howdy Chicago!, it was a promotional film made for Chicago’s Pageant of Progress trade show. It was watched by 11 attendees of the show aboard an Aeromarine Airways Model 75 flying boat while the plane circled 2,000 feet above the Windy City. The world had to wait four more years to see the first Hollywood film shown in flight: The Lost World, screened on an Imperial Airways flight on April 6, 1925.

After that, in-flight entertainment slowly began to gain traction. By early 1992, Nintendo of America was studying the possibility of an on-demand Super Nintendo game service for airplanes and hotels. Named the Nintendo Gateway System, it was designed primarily for airplanes, since they were the most restrictive environment. The reasoning was that any service that could fit into a plane could also be adapted, with some effort, to a hotel.

Work started in early 1992 and lasted 18 months. The main challenge was making a device small enough to fit into the very limited space available on airplanes. The specifications were extremely restrictive: 3.5 × 3.5 × 0.5 inches. Nintendo knew the system would be expensive, so to attract airlines it had to make the system as appealing as possible. With this in mind, Nintendo added several features, such as pay-per-view movies, audio CD listening, and telephone service. These features added complexity, and the system needed approval from the FAA before it could be installed on any aircraft.

The system was designed to serve up to three seats at once by combining three Super Nintendo units on the same card. These cards, called Triple Gateway System cards, came in configurations of two or three Super NES units per card. For rows of four seats, two cards were used. To save even more space, all games were stored on a shared hard drive and downloaded to the Gateway unit on request. The game was then copied into the unit’s 2 MB of memory.

Nintendo had no experience building airplane or hotel entertainment systems. The FamicomBox and Super Famicom Box were stand-alone consoles rather than full entertainment systems. Nintendo therefore partnered with Hughes-Avicom International for the airplane interface and with LodgeNet Entertainment Corp. for the hotel systems.

Release of the Nintendo Gateway System
By mid-1993, the system was finally ready to be deployed. Although it was a great opportunity, retrofitting an aircraft was very expensive. The cost came to around $4,000 per seat, or about $1.5 million for a Boeing 747. Airlines still found the system attractive, quickly realizing that the cost could be recovered on international flights. Airlines such as Air Canada, Alitalia, ANA, BMI, China Airlines, Kuwait Airways, Malaysia Airlines, Northwest Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways and Virgin Atlantic installed the system on their planes. In the end, Nintendo’s bet paid off, earning it about $10 million per year in royalties.

Airlines were also very happy. They could charge $4 per hour for games and $6 per movie. Movies were also sold in packages: $9 for two movies or $12 for three.

LodgeNet: Nintendo in Hotel Rooms
LodgeNet started in 1980 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as the Satellite Movie Company, founded by Tim Flynn to sell satellite TV systems to hotels. It began offering pay-per-view movies to hotel guests in 1986 and took the name LodgeNet Entertainment Corporation in September 1991. In October 1993 it went public on Nasdaq (ticker LNET). Its main rivals in hotel pay-TV were SpectraVision and On Command.

Nintendo needed a partner that already had cables running into thousands of hotel rooms, and LodgeNet needed something besides movies to sell to guests. Starting in late 1993, LodgeNet offered on-demand Super Nintendo games on its hotel network. The service proved popular, and Nintendo games quickly became one of LodgeNet’s signature in-room products, next to pay-per-view movies.

Unlike the airline version, nothing game-related sat in the room except the controller. The hotel version was simpler. There were fewer constraints, and since hotel guests do not all use the entertainment system at the same time, there was no need to install a complete system in each room. Instead, each room had a receiver for the controller, which connected to a set of servers in the hotel holding a fixed number of Gateway cards. The Super NES hardware lived in racks of game servers in the hotel’s equipment room. The guest plugged a special LodgeNet controller into the TV or set-top box, picked a game from an on-screen menu, and the game was streamed to the TV over LodgeNet’s in-house network.

• Price: usually $6.95 plus tax per hour, billed to the room. After an hour, the game stopped and asked the guest to buy more time.
• Controllers: LodgeNet controllers kept the Nintendo button layout but added buttons for the menu, reset and TV volume. The Nintendo 64 version had no accessory slot, so the Controller Pak, Rumble Pak and Transfer Pak couldn’t be used.
• One player only: each room had a single controller, so multiplayer modes were removed or disabled in many games.
• No saves: progress wasn’t kept between guests. Save data was wiped when switching games, and some games were modified to warn players.

The service spread fast because a hotel didn’t need a console in every room, only enough game servers for the guests playing at the same time.

• April 1996: about 200,000 hotel rooms offered Super Nintendo games.
• June 1998: about 500,000 rooms.
• Mid-1999: about 530,000 rooms, growing by roughly 11,000 rooms per month.

On June 16, 1998, Nintendo and LodgeNet signed a 10-year licensing agreement to bring the Nintendo 64 to hotel rooms. After research and field testing, installations began in June 1999. Within four months, the N64 was in more than 50,000 rooms at nearly 350 hotels, resorts and casinos, and LodgeNet’s Nintendo service (SNES and N64 combined) reached more than 540,000 rooms in the US and Canada. Existing Super NES hotels were upgraded to the N64 when their contracts came up for renewal.

The N64 service launched with more than 20 games, including The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64, and grew to 38 titles. From September 2000, new N64 games reached more than 1,000 hotels on the same day they hit store shelves. While the LodgeNet partnership was still profitable for Nintendo, the integration with the Airlines proved to be less and less viable. At this point, it was decided not to port the N64 or any future system to airplanes.

The GameCube came next, again only in hotels. It eventually offered 43 titles, from Super Mario Sunshine to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The GameCube system used standard GameCube memory cards on the server side.

Demise
LodgeNet kept growing through acquisitions, buying its old rival On Command in 2007 and renaming itself LodgeNet Interactive in 2008. With the LodgeNet Entertainment System 3000, LodgeNet manage to downsize the cost to about $50 per room to install. At its peak around 2009, its network reached roughly 2 million hotel rooms. But the purchases left it deep in debt, and guests were bringing their own laptops, phones and handheld consoles. By 2011 its footprint had fallen to about 1.5 million rooms.

Nintendo’s official Gateway website closed in mid-2008. On December 31, 2012, LodgeNet announced a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy, filed on January 28, 2013, as part of a deal handing control to Colony Capital. Colony completed the takeover on March 28, 2013, and on June 25, 2013, the company was renamed SONIFI Solutions. N64 units were reportedly still running in a few hotels in 2013.

Preservation
For years, almost nothing from the service had been preserved. That changed in 2023:

• February 26, 2023: the Gateway-exclusive Noughts & Crosses was dumped and shared anonymously in a game preservation community.
• April 26, 2023: the preservation group Forest Illusion released 31 of the 38 known LodgeNet N64 games, recovered from a complete hotel system.

Most of the N64 games are close to their retail versions, with multiplayer disabled. A few are genuinely different: the LodgeNet Donkey Kong 64 is a revision never sold in stores, which fixes a camera bug and adds an option to skip the training barrels (likely because of the hourly time limit). The LodgeNet Ocarina of Time appears to be a build between version 1.2 and the later GameCube release.

Technical Specifications

Airline version (seat display unit)

• Game hardware: Custom Super NES board
• CPU: 16-bit 65816-compatible processor (Super NES CPU)
• Working RAM: 128 KB
• Game storage: 2 MB pseudo-static RAM; games downloaded from the aircraft’s server (limited to 16-megabit games at launch)
• Graphics and sound: Standard Super NES picture processing unit and audio processing unit
• Interface controller: 8-bit 8051-family microcontroller (Philips) controlling the LCD screen and tuner
• Display: Seat-back LCD
• Network: Master computer with hard disk → zone computers → seat electronic boxes → seat display units (RS-232 link)
• Other features: Magnetic credit-card reader for payments; movies, music, telephone, shopping and surveys
• Controller: Armrest controller with a Super NES button layout
• Platforms over time: Super NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance

Hotel version (LodgeNet)

• Game hardware: Super NES, later Nintendo 64 and GameCube, running from game servers in the hotel’s equipment room
• In-room hardware: Set-top box or TV card receiving the game signal
• Controller: Special LodgeNet controllers with a phone-style cord and extra buttons for purchase menus
• Price to guests: Usually $6.95 per hour

Games
Games for the Nintendo Gateway System were never sold in stores. Each game was licensed to Nintendo’s partners for a fixed period and stored on a central server, which sent it to the player’s seat or hotel room on request. The airline and hotel versions offered different games. Airlines had the Super NES and later the Game Boy family. Hotels had the Super NES and later the Nintendo 64 and GameCube. Because each seat or room had only one controller, many games were modified for single-player play.

Nintendo also made a few simple games just for the Gateway System, aimed at casual travellers: Noughts & Crosses (a Tic-Tac-Toe game), Hangman, Postcard Puzzle (a sliding-tile puzzle), and stand-alone versions of Tetris and Dr. Mario. None of these were ever sold. Noughts & Crosses is the only one whose cartridge has been found so far. It sits on an SA-1 flash cartridge and shows a 1998 copyright date.

At launch, the airline system offered only ten games, including The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, F-Zero and Super Mario World. The first airline units could only hold games of up to 16 megabits, because games were copied into 2 MB of memory. Larger games such as Donkey Kong Country therefore could not run on the early airline version.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System (hotels and airlines)

Nintendo 64 (hotels only)

• 1080° Snowboarding
• Donkey Kong 64
• Dr. Mario 64
• Excitebike 64
• Extreme-G
• F-Zero X
• Forsaken 64
• Gauntlet Legends
• Hydro Thunder
• Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Mario Golf
• Mario Kart 64
• Mario Party 3
• Mario Tennis
• Midway’s Greatest Arcade Hits
• Milo’s Astro Lanes
• Mortal Kombat 4
• Namco Museum 64
• The New Tetris
• Paper Mario
• Pilotwings 64
• Pokémon Snap
• Rampage 2: Universal Tour
• Ready 2 Rumble Boxing
• Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA
• San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing
• Star Fox 64
• Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
• Super Mario 64
• Super Smash Bros.
• Turok 2: Seeds of Evil
• Virtual Chess 64
• Virtual Pool 64
• Wave Race 64
• Yoshi’s Story

GameCube (hotels only)

• 1080° Avalanche
• Animal Crossing
• Backyard Baseball 2007
• Battalion Wars
• Chibi-Robo!
• Custom Robo
• Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
• Geist
• Kirby Air Ride
• The Legend of Zelda: Collector’s Edition
• The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
• Luigi’s Mansion
• Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour
• Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
• Mario Party 4
• Mario Party 5
• Mario Party 6
• Mario Party 7
• Mario Power Tennis
• Metroid Prime
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
• Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
• Pikmin
• Pikmin 2
• Pokémon Channel
• Pokémon Colosseum
• Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness
• Star Fox: Assault
• Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader
• Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike
• Super Mario Strikers
• Super Mario Sunshine
• TMNT
• Tomb Raider: Legend
• The Urbz: Sims in the City
• Wario World
• WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Game$!
• Wave Race: Blue Storm

Game Boy and Game Boy Color (airlines only)

• Baseball
• Dr. Mario
• F1 Race
• Game & Watch Gallery
• Game & Watch Gallery 2
• Game & Watch Gallery 3
• Golf
• Kirby’s Dream Land 2
• Kirby’s Pinball Land
• Kirby’s Star Stacker
• The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
• Mario Golf
• Mario Tennis
• Metroid II: Return of Samus
• Picross 2
• Pokémon Red Version
• Pokémon Blue Version
• Pokémon Yellow Version
• Pokémon Gold Version
• Pokémon Silver Version
• Pokémon Pinball
• Pokémon Puzzle Challenge
• Pokémon Trading Card Game
• Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
• Super Mario Land
• Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
• Tennis
• Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
• Wario Land II
• Wario Land 3
• Yakuman

Game Boy Advance (airlines only)

• Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising
• Dr. Mario & Puzzle League
• Fire Emblem (The Blazing Blade)
• Game & Watch Gallery 4
• Kirby & the Amazing Mirror
• Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past & Four Swords
• Mario Kart: Super Circuit
• Mario Pinball Land
• Pokémon Pinball: Ruby & Sapphire
• Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World
• Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3
• Wario Land 4