Addressing misinformation in Nintendo trivia
October 6, 2025
Note: This was originally published on Tumblr but has been moved here.
I presume folks who are reading this are familiar with Nintendo. You've probably learned something about the history of the company whether that's watching YouTube videos or reading into related topics in books or on wiki sites. These resources usually have the best intentions on informing users, but sometimes errors slip in the cracks and it can take quite a while for them to be addressed. Even when those errors are addressed, some resources continue to publish information with the same errors in-tact. This post will mainly be going over a few examples of Nintendo related trivia that you may have seen floating around one way or another.
❌Nintendo once operated love hotels
Let's get the most infamous one out of the way. The story goes that during the 1960's Nintendo's third president Hiroshi Yamauchi led the company to various business ventures. These included instant rice, a taxi service, and most important to this story: love hotels. This is probably the most famous story from this period of Nintendo's history and unfortunately it is an urban legend, not fact.
The story has been repeated many times and if you dig into where it came from, the earliest mention of it comes from the 1993 book Game Over by David Sheff. I won't drill too much into this book here but basically in recent years it has garnered a reputation for its poor sourcing and questionable claims. Video game historians these days consider Game Over to generally be a bad source but back when this book was relatively new, nobody questioned it! It was once praised for highlighting Nintendo history which is probably why this love hotel story spread.
But what about the instant rice and taxi services? Unlike the love hotels, we actually have evidence for those but it's not what it's cracked up to be. The taxi service was an investment Yamauchi made and Nintendo kind of got roped in as a result of said investment. The instant rice was a partnership between three different companies of which Nintendo was one of them. Nintendo would eventually get into toys and evolve into the video game company we know of today. (Source)
❌Power Punch II is a sequel to Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!
This accepted "fact" is well known to Punch-Out!! fans but lets address the elephant in the room. This is a third-party game for the NES. Developed by Beam Software and published by American Softworks. So how in the world would a third party game be a sequel to a first party Nintendo game? That's because of one connection: Mike Tyson.
Let's quickly run through the early history before drilling into the alleged story. Punch-Out!! was originally an arcade game released in 1984. In 1987, Nintendo R&D3 was developing a Famicom adaptation of the boxing game which notably included future champ Mike Tyson. Nintendo had a three year licensing agreement to use his likeness in the game. It would later release that year for the Famicom and NES under the title Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!. When the licensing agreement ran its course in 1990, Nintendo released a modified version under the title Punch-Out!! that replaced Mike Tyson with an original character called Mr. Dream.
Now onto Power Punch II, the story goes that Nintendo commissioned the game as a follow-up to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! but disowned it after Mike Tyson got into very hot water. Development was handed over to Beam Software and was later released without the likeness of Mike Tyson.
Some version of this story has been circulating around since the early 2000s but I want to focus on one particular resource that has spread this: English Wikipedia. The very first revision of the Power Punch II article features this story with no sources to back it up. Since then it has spread around with hardly anyone challenging the story or giving it thought. Even some of your favorite YouTubers have mentioned this story!
