This Week in Retro: The Neo•Geo (Patreon)

April 26, 1990: SNK creates NEOGEO, the greatest console ever sold

by Diamond Feit

Just as none of us are immune to propaganda, retro game fans everywhere should be aware that we are likewise not immune to nostalgia. There is a palpable comfort to revisiting old things and remembering both past activities and our past selves—a sense that somehow things were "better before" during a "simpler time". We should all remind ourselves that nostalgia can be a trap, a deception we willingly accept because we all want to convince ourselves that somehow the things we liked are inherently better than the stranger things that young people like today. As Seymour Skinner so thoughtfully put it: "No, it is the children who are wrong."

With all of that in mind, I am here today to exalt the NEOGEO as the best video game console ever made.

Let's play a game of make-believe: Imagine you are the owner of a Japanese arcade in 1990. Business is booming, but business is also costly. There is a steady flow of exciting games being released, but each game costs hundreds of thousands of yen (that is, thousands of U.S. dollars). If you own an arcade, you want to keep getting new games to keep your customers coming back, but each purchase is an expensive gamble; at 100 yen per credit, even a low-end arcade game would need to draw at least 2000 coins into its slot to break even. 

Suddenly, in April of 1990, there's a new machine available called NEO•GEO (neh-oh ji-oh in Japanese, incidentally). It's different than all the others. Each cabinet holds multiple games inside—up to 6—and players get to choose which game they want to play. Considering the astronomical cost of real estate in Japan during the bubble era, space is at a premium. One machine offering an assortment of games is welcome news. Better still, at ¥20,000 each (about US$200), these games are only 1/10th the cost of the competition.

And can we talk about those games?? The four NEOGEO launch games are Baseball Stars Professional, Magician Lord, NAM 1975, and Mahjong Kyoretsuden and they have something for everyone: a bold baseball simulation with big cartoony players, a fantasy action platformer, a Cabal-like scrolling military shooter, and pornographic mahjong. By the end of 1990, the library had expanded to 10 titles, and you could own all of them for the same price as just one of the other machines on the market.

Now flip perspectives: You are a Japanese arcade denizen and you are not hurting for game selection. If you're old enough, you might remember when Space Invaders was everywhere and the entire industry was churning out vertical shooters, but that was a decade ago. Now, video games are abundant and cover a wide variety of genres. Suddenly, in April of 1990, there's a new machine available called NEO•GEO and it's different than all the others. The cabinets contain more than one game, letting you choose what you want to play. The games all come from different genres, yet they all have a distinct feel to them: Lots of colors, big sprites, and an abundance of people talking! There's even a headphone jack so you can tune out the rest of the arcade and just listen.

Better still, there's a slot for something called a "memory card" which lets you save your game and continue it later. With one card you can save multiple games and play them on any cabinet you want! You imagine that maybe someday, other arcade games will offer this feature, and maybe home consoles too... but for now, the NEO•GEO is the first and only system that lets you maintain progress over time.

All of these reasons are very compelling, but this is all arcade business. The real magic that made the NEO•GEO the greatest console ever made was what happened a year later: It became a home console that perfectly replicated the arcade experience. Again, try to imagine being a video game player in 1991. Look at your living room options: The NES was popular but running low on steam; the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and TurboGrafx-16 were already available and by year's end; the Super Nintendo was out in the US. Arcade games, though, are still in high demand, and every home conversion of arcade hits needs to be scaled down in order to run on 8/16-bit machines.

The NEO•GEO home console was essentially the same as the arcade hardware: It didn't have a screen attached, but the system included heavy-duty, high-quality joysticks as standard controllers, and it supported the same memory cards as its arcade counterpart. That meant players could not only ferry their saved games between arcade cabinets, but from their own home to the arcade and back. Compromise was now removed from the equation in the arcade/console divide; players could freely enjoy identical games in either environment with their own persistent save data.

If that was the end of the story, the NEO•GEO would have won the console wars hands down and SNK would be bigger than Disney today, but there were two wrinkles in the plan. The first issue was that which worked to an arcade owner's advantage was a major disadvantage in the home console market: Game costs. $200 is a bargain for an arcade game, but it is a king's ransom for a home console game. Indeed, NEO•GEO cartridges were more expensive than most competing hardware, let alone software. In Japan, the NEO•GEO was offered to consumers for rental—very rare given that renting video games in Japan remains illegal to this day—but ultimately the sky-high costs of the hardware and software imprisoned NEO•GEO in a niche market from which it never escaped.

The second issue was the eventual collapse of the arcade market. Even in Japan, the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 1990s were very different landscapes. Every home console offered its own memory cards, which led to longer, deeper experiences than were possible in an arcade setting. The handheld market had also blown up, and Pokémon was a global hit. Technology-wise, arcades were still superior, but the line between arcade and console was thinner than ever. Most folks were either content with ports if they hadn't abandoned the arcade entirely for survival horror, first-person shooters, annual sports sims, or 100-hour RPGs. Permanently bound to its roots, the NEO•GEO never adapted to these shifting tastes; it was born in the arcades, and when arcades died, the NEO•GEO was soon to follow.

Surviving on niche support and mail-order sales, the NEO•GEO was exceptionally long-lived. From its initial 1990 debut to its final game released in 2004, the NEO•GEO managed to last 14 years; during that same time period, Nintendo would release three home consoles, Sony would release two, and Sega and Hudson both would abandon the console market altogether. The NEO•GEO even outlived SNK itself, at least in its original form: The company went bankrupt in 2001 but managed to survive after selling its assets and winning a legal battle.

The NEO•GEO legacy is strong. Arcades may be a distant memory for many video game enthusiasts, with younger fans having grown up entirely on consoles, handhelds, and PCs, but many NEO•GEO games remain relevant today thanks to decades of compilations, modern ports of classic titles, and even emulation. While the ability to download and play arcade games for free did SNK no favors at the turn of the millennium, it did expose NEO•GEO games to countless fans who never could have afforded the system in real life. At this point, however, most NEO•GEO games are readily available a la carte on major consoles as well as Steam for a few dollars apiece. Divorced of context, they are perhaps less mind-blowing to today's audiences, but they still look and sound terrific on a big screen.

My NEO•GEO journey was unique. The arcade cabinet—bright red in the U.S.—hooked me from the start, and with my headphones plugged in I became infatuated with not just the soundtracks of NEO•GEO games but the words. Once fighting games exploded in arcades and the NEO•GEO leaned into the genre, I was listening to dozens of characters shout at each other in a language I didn't know. It took many years, but there's a direct correlation from that teenager listening to Ryo Sakazaki challenge Mr. Karate in Art of Fighting to a young adult studying Japanese after work to a college graduate moving to Japan in 2007 where he—I—still lives.

Obviously "the NEO•GEO is the best video game console ever made" is a subjective statement that can neither be proven nor disproven, but I can think of no video game platform that had a greater effect on me. It arrived at just the right moment in history and was ahead of its time, but it lived long enough to see the world catch up and even surpass it. For fans like me, though, the NEO•GEO was never old-fashioned or stuck in the past. It was exactly what I wanted a video game to be.