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This is an insane story that comes to us from Nintendo Life. They ran an article today that sheds some light on what game development was like in Japan some 20 years ago. Apparently, some of the big Japanese developers had big underground ties to gangsters and corrupt cops. Who knew!

Sure, there have always been hushed whispers of shady dealings but nothing ever really concrete. That is until now thanks to a new book by John Szczepaniak called The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2. The interview segments below come not from one individual source but different sources at different times all combined together under the catch-all pseudonym Hideo Nanashi.

The first story is of a Japanese game developer that claims his sister was kidnapped by orders of a major Japanese game development studio.
My younger sister was kidnapped. [REDACTED] hired some gangsters to do it. They did it to make me stop cooperating with Nintendo.

Nanashi continues on to explain how many studios that work on arcade machines also have huge ties to the world of organized crime, including the Yakuza.
In Japan, you have these evil companies that always crop up, and unlike the West, in Japan there's a perception that "play" is bad, the opposite of hard work. So amusement-oriented industries inevitably become infested with evil companies and ties to the underworld. Take arcades, for example. In legal terms, they're covered under laws regarding the entertainment and amusement trades. So they're managed under the same laws that regulate the adult, or "pink", industry. Because of that, the underworld gets involved. The only companies that have been able to do business while staying clean are probably Nintendo and Namco.

With that background in mind, Nanashi goes into greater detail on the kidnapping story.
It was one of their game machines. I dropped it in front of their offices, smashed it. And I told them that one of their employees would be next. To show them that I was serious. That way they would feel ashamed of their actions, you know? It was easy for me to get a [REDACTED] arcade cabinet cheaply, so I bought one from a distributor. I thought about robbing a [REDACTED] arcade, too, but that's much more difficult, and that would make me a criminal. With what I ended up doing, I could have been charged with something like unlawful dumping of garbage, but that's a minor offence. Whereas if I had robbed a [REDACTED] arcade, I would have been arrested. [REDACTED] was well-versed in using the underworld to get what they want, so if you're going up against them, you have to be smart. They're a big company, so if you try to fight them with ordinary methods, they'll work with the police and get the legal system to come after you. They might even pay off a politician, like a member of the National Diet. Who knows what they're capable of?
I just smashed it in front of their main office in the middle of the night. It was easy. The [REDACTED] headquarters are in [REDACTED] now, but back then they were near [REDACTED] Airport. Their office building was right in front of a major street, in a commercial district without any residential homes.
...I didn't dump it myself. I had someone else do it, because I don't have a driver's license. I had him just drop the machine and dump it, so I don't know how damaged it was, but I assume it smashed apart. And then I sent [REDACTED] a letter.

Beyond all of that, Nanashi also sheds some light on so-called "quarantine rooms" inside of some of those buildings.
I don't know how much you know about [REDACTED], but are you aware of the "quarantine room" [隔離部屋, literal translation: "Isolation room"] problem from around the year 2000? They would put employees alone in a room and give them absolutely nothing to do, in order to make them resign. [REDACTED] did that, and former [REDACTED] employees sued them and won. That's the kind of thing [REDACTED] did back then. They didn't just put people behind a partition or something, they sent them away to a completely different floor of the building. [REDACTED] didn't just lose a lawsuit over this, they completely tarnished their image. Nobody wanted to buy games from a company like that. It became a major social issue. Like this article, about [REDACTED] being sued for the quarantine room and issuing a public apology.

Nintendo Life says that they have verified many of the claims mentioned in the quotes above. Keep in mind that most of this happened roughly 20 years ago and things have certainly changed since then.

With that said, who do you think the company is that is being discussed here? There are only a couple of them that would make a lot of sense given the time period.