{"id":1915,"date":"2026-04-12T15:11:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T15:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2020\/11\/30_years_after_nintendos_operation_midnight_shipping_and_console_launches_are_still_fraught_with_danger"},"modified":"2026-04-12T15:11:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T15:11:09","slug":"30-years-after-nintendos-operation-midnight-shipping-and-console-launches-are-still-fraught-with-danger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/30-years-after-nintendos-operation-midnight-shipping-and-console-launches-are-still-fraught-with-danger\/","title":{"rendered":"30 Years After Nintendo’s “Operation Midnight Shipping” And Console Launches Are Still Fraught With Danger"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Super<\/a>\u00a9 Nintendo Life<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

There’s a famous story relating to the launch of the Super Famicom<\/a> in Japan \u2013 an event which took place a staggering 30 years ago today \u2013 that Nintendo decided to ship the console to stores during the night to avoid deliveries being intercepted by Yakuza<\/a> crime gangs.<\/p>\n

Dubbed “Operation Midnight Shipping”, the plan was concocted by Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi and his right-hand man Hiroshi Imanishi after the former got wind that the Yakuza were planning to steal shipments of the Super Famicom before they reached stores. Given the intense hype surrounding the release of the console \u2013 the successor to the Famicom, then Japan’s most popular console by some margin \u2013 the Yakuza rightly sensed that high profits could be made by selling systems at inflated prices on the black market.<\/p>\n

The story goes that in the early hours of the 21st November 1990, 300,000 Super Famicom consoles were quietly loaded into vans and distributed across the country, before the Yakuza \u2013 or the majority of Japan itself \u2013 had woken from their slumber. The operation was kept top-secret, with only a small handful of people being made aware of when the trucks would be leaving, where they’d be heading and the cargo they contained. As a result, the Yakuza ended up empty-handed and all 300,000 launch systems got to their rightful owners.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the present day, and it would seem that the PlayStation 5 launch in the UK<\/a> hasn’t been so lucky \u2013 and while the Yakuza naturally isn’t involved this time around, it seems that some shady individuals have ruined the launch of Sony’s new system for some of its customers who pre-ordered with online retail giant Amazon.<\/p>\n

One of those customers is our very own Ant Dickens, who, like several other UK buyers which pre-ordered with Amazon, found that their PS5 console had been replaced by a totally different item and that the packaging had been sealed up with transparent tape (rather than Amazon’s own parcel tape). Others had been sent incorrect items (something which does tend to happen from time to time) while some customers had shipments marked as ‘delivered’ that never even turned up, despite the delivery van being within sight of their home:<\/p>\n