Man who tried to blow up Nintendo HQ arrested by Japanese police

This isn’t Nintendo’s first rodeo (Tokumeigakarinoaoshima/Wikipedia)

Nintendo has been subjected to a new wave of bomb threats, to both its Japanese HQ and individual employees, as a 27-year-old man is arrested.

Video game fans acting aggressively and unreasonably on the internet is a worldwide phenomenon. Just this week we’ve had so many people complaining about innocuous indie game Mixtape that Microsoft felt they had to get involved, although that’s nothing compared to plotting to blow up Nintendo.

Death threats against individual developers are sadly commonplace, thanks to social media, but it’s relatively rare for whole companies to be targeted. Nintendo has attracted more attention then most though, to the point where it’s had to cancel public events in the past due to credible threats.

The most recent of these was in 2024 but now a 27-year-old unemployed man has been arrested for sending bomb threats to Nintendo, describing how he was going to blow up their headquarters in Kyoto.

Nintendo reported the threats to police on March 16 but according to reports translated by Automaton the man was only arrested this week, for ‘suspected obstruction of business.’

Apparently, he sent letters to individual employees with messages such as ‘I’m going to blow you all up’ and the clearly incorrect suggestion that, ‘My plans cannot be thwarted.’

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He also claimed to have planted ‘multiple bombs’ at the headquarters, but a search was conducted and, perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing was found. No motive has been made known, but apparently the man has admitted to the charges.

Although Nintendo has received similar threats before none of them have turned out to be genuine. Nevertheless, they were forced to cancel the Splatoon Koshien National Finals 2023 tournament in Japan because of the danger, and then the Nintendo Live 2024 Tokyo event the following year, which would’ve cost Nintendo a lot of money and ruined the fun for ordinary fans.

The problem is there’s no real way to prevent any of this and if a company did receive a threat, and didn’t do anything about it, they’d be in real trouble.

In general, the only obvious solution seems to be tougher punishments for those making threats, although so far there are few examples of that happening anywhere in the world, with disgruntled fans able to make idle threats online with just a few keystrokes.

Mixtape has also caused an unreasonable amount of anger for no reason (Annapurna Interactive)

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