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History
The history of the Nintendo Gateway System can be traced back as far as 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 viewed by 11 attendees of the trade show on board an Aeromarine Airways Model 75 amphibian while the plane circled 2,000 feet above the Windy City. The world had to wait four more years to see the first in-flight Hollywood film, The Lost World, which aired in 1925 on an Imperial Airways flight.
After that, the concept of in-flight entertainment systems slowly began to gain traction. By the beginning of 1992, Nintendo of America started assessing the possibility of implementing an on-demand Super Nintendo games service for planes and hotels. Dubbed the Nintendo Gateway System, the system was primarily designed to fit into airplanes, as this was the most constraining environment to implement. The logic was that, although not trivial, any service that could fit into a plane could also be made to work in a hotel.
Work started early in 1992 and lasted 18 months. The main challenge was to make a device small enough to fit into the very limited space available in airplanes. The specifications they were given were extremely restrictive: 3.5 inches × 3.5 inches × 0.5 inches. Nintendo knew the system would be expensive, and to entice airline companies to acquire it, they had to make it as attractive as possible. With this in mind, Nintendo added multiple features such as pay-per-view movies, audio CD recording, and phone service. This plethora of features added complexity and required approval (green-lighting) by the FAA before the system could be deployed on any aircraft.
The system was designed to accommodate up to three seats at the same time by combining three Super Nintendo units on the same card. Called the Triple Gateway System, these cards came in configurations of either two or three Super NES units per card. For rows with four seats, two devices would be used. To further limit space requirements, all games were stored on a shared hard drive and downloaded by the Gateway system when requested. The game would then be copied into the device’s 2 MB of memory.
For the hotel version, things were simpler. There were fewer constraints, and since hotel guests are not all using the entertainment system at the same time, there was no need to install a complete system in each room. Instead, a receiver was installed into which the controller would plug. The system would then connect to a set of servers located in the hotel that held a predefined number of Gateway cards.
As Nintendo had no experience creating plane or hotel entertainment systems (aside from the FamicomBox and the Super Famicom Box, which were more stand-alone consoles than full entertainment systems), they partnered with Hughes-Avicom International for the airplane interface and with LodgeNet Entertainment Corp. for the hotel systems.
Release
By July 1993, the system was finally ready to be deployed. Although it was a great opportunity, the cost of retrofitting an aircraft was very high. The cost came to around $4,000 per seat, which for a 747 amounted to about $1.5 million per plane. However, the system was deemed attractive enough by airline companies, which quickly understood that the cost would be recouped very quickly on international flights. Companies such as Air Canada, Alitalia, ANA, BMI, China Airlines, Kuwait Airways, Malaysia Airlines, Northwest Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways, and Virgin Atlantic all opted to install the system on their planes. In the end, Nintendo won their bet and were able to make $10 million per year in royalties from this initiative.
Airlines were also very happy. They were able to charge $4 per hour for games and $6 for a movie. Movies could also be purchased in packages: $9 for two movies or $12 for three.
The LodgeNet Entertainment System 3000 was even more successful, with almost 1,000,000 rooms equipped with the system. The reason was simple: the system cost only around $50 per room to install.
Demise
The Gateway System remained relevant for a while, but with the release of newer video game consoles and more advanced in-flight entertainment systems, its appeal quickly faded. Nintendo continued to support the Gateway System for multiple generations on the LodgeNet side (including N64 and GameCube versions), but these were never ported to the airplane systems. The reason was straightforward: airlines did not want to reinvest millions of dollars upgrading their systems, as the planes had to be partially disassembled to install the various components. Hotels had a much simpler setup and could be upgraded quite easily, which explains why Nintendo continued to support them for quite some time.
However, with advances in technology, hotel entertainment became less and less profitable. By 2006, LodgeNet was already accumulating debt, and the situation worsened with the arrival of streaming services. The company survived a few more years before declaring bankruptcy in 2013.
A list of games, as well as a very interesting article, can be found here:
https://snescentral.com/article.php?id=1019