When delays and travel are long, people inevitably get bored… and that means potential customers waiting to be entertained in some way. Airlines and hotel chains understood this like no one else, and Nintendo also saw a very lucrative opportunity, giving rise to the Nintendo Gateway System. Thanks to this special platform, users could access Nintendo's main titles on their most important consoles... paying a real fortune per hour.
Suppose you have an eight-hour flight ahead. How do you make the most of it? What do you do to entertain yourself? These days, the market offers a wide range of handheld consoles, from generic clones to advanced systems like the Steam Deck, but many simply choose to load their smartphones, tablets, and laptops with all kinds of content before starting the trip. A bit of "airplane mode" to avoid conflicts, and the rest is a matter of keeping the batteries at an acceptable level.
However, imagine for a moment that we have to go through that situation in the mid-'90s. The best within our reach was a Game Boy, which lasted 15 hours with a couple of AAs, largely due to the absence of a backlight. But Nintendo did not rest on its laurels, and decided to join forces with several airlines and hotel chains to deploy its Nintendo Gateway System.
Nintendo Gateway System, or How to Pay $7 an Hour for Super Mario 64
History tells us that in the mid-'80s and early '90s, IFE (in-flight entertainment) systems made a very important leap in quality to respond to customer demands. The "projected movie" at the front of the cabin lost all relevance once private screens were installed in the seats, but they could do much more than play movies.
In 1992, Nintendo of America evaluated the possibility of creating an on-demand platform to distribute Super Nintendo games on planes and in hotels. That's how the Nintendo Gateway System was born, designed mainly for the commercial aviation industry... but if they could make it work inside a plane, it wouldn't be very complicated to adapt it to hotel rooms.
Video Game Kraken published this excellent image of the system for airplanes.
Logically, the cost of such a system would be very high, but Nintendo managed to sweeten the platform by adding secondary features such as pay-per-view movies, audio recording, and telephony. At first, the system was a combination of proprietary software and "super consoles", with two or three Super Nintendos fused into a single card, covering 3-4 seats (using two cards in the second case). To optimize space, all games were loaded on a shared hard drive (other sources mention floppies), and the system downloaded them into a 2-megabyte memory per device.
The hotel version turned out to be simpler, as it was not necessary to install a complete system in each room. Two of Nintendo's most important partners in the development and deployment of its Gateway System were Hughes-Avicom International for airplanes, and LodgeNet Entertainment Corp. (now SONIFI Solutions).
SNES Central obtained this image.
The LodgeNet edition of the Nintendo Gateway System turned out to be more popular (after all, its cost was much lower), and it is the one most users remember. In terms of handheld consoles, it came to offer 46 titles for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance, while the home console catalog expanded to 130 games distributed among the Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, and GameCube (49, 38, and 43 respectively).
As for prices, airlines charged $4 an hour for a game, or $6-$9-$12 for one, two, or three movies. In contrast, the LodgeNet variant cost $6.95 plus taxes... per hour.
Sources: Video Game Kraken, SNES Central, Wikipedia, Top Hat Gaming Man
