Following the opening of the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, could a Nintendo hotel be next?
Earlier this month, the world’s first-ever Nintendo Museum opened in the company’s home prefecture of Kyoto, and it immediately shot to the top of must-visit attractions for fans of the storied video game developer. It’s kind of ironic, though, that while a Nintendo Museum is something that many gamers have been waiting their whole life for, if you’re going to visit the place you’re going to have to throw together a trip on pretty short notice.
Similar to the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, the Nintendo Museum has chosen to cap daily attendance in order to limit crowd sizes and improve guest experiences, and so advance reservations are required. With demand expected to far outstrip supply, reservation privileges are awarded by a lottery system, and the farthest in advance reservations can be made is three calendar months ahead of your visit. That can leave you with a pretty tight window in which to sort out hotel accommodations, especially with Kyoto, as one of Japan’s top tourism destinations, not always being an easy place in which to find vacancies.
So wouldn’t it be nice if, in addition to a Nintendo Museum, there was also a Nintendo hotel? That might indeed be something the company has in the cards, judging from recent trademark filings noted by website Chinzai Watch, which monitors filings with the Japanese government’s patent office.
According to Chinzai Watch, this month Nintendo filed a number of applications for Class 43 trademarks, which covers hotel and restaurant services. In addition to the Japanese text renderings of Dobutsu no Mori (the Japanese title of the Animal Crossing series), Splatoon, and Pikmin, Chinzai Watch says filings were made for the following three symbols from the Animal Crossing, Splatoon, and Super Smash Bros. franchises.
Each filing designates the possible uses as:
“Provision of lodging facilities, lodging facility contract mediation or intermediation functions, hotel reservation intermediation, provision of food and beverages, provision of food and beverages within a restaurant, provision of food and beverages within a bar, provision of accommodation for animals, infant/toddler daycare, provision of non-nursing residential facilities for senior citizens, provision of conference rooms, futon provision, furniture provision, provision of table linens or glassware, provision of towels”
The lumping of hotel and restaurant operations into the same trademark category does make it harder to see what Nintendo is planning, as it also opens up the possibility of themed cafes or items within the Nintendo Museum’s own on-site restaurant. That said, considering that there are no doubt going to be a number of people who came all the way to Kyoto specifically to visit the museum, it’s a pretty good bet that a lot of them would enjoy staying in a hotel that’s similarly steeped in Nintendo atmosphere.
Source: Chinzai Watch (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) via Hachima Kiko
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