The History of Neo Geo

The hardware grew out of an earlier SNK and Alpha Denshi arcade platform used in Time Soldiers (1987) and P.O.W.: Prisoners of War (1988), and was essentially developed by Alpha Denshi's Eiji Fukatsu, with the final specifications settled in December 1989. Takashi Nishiyama, who had created Street Fighter at Capcom before joining SNK, proposed the defining idea: an arcade system that loads games from ROM cartridges the way a console does, plus a home version of the same system. His stated reasons were practical ones, cheaper distribution into markets such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Central America, and South America, where dedicated arcade games were hard to sell because of piracy.

SNK announced the system in Osaka on January 31, 1990, showing NAM-1975, Magician Lord, Baseball Stars Professional, Top Player's Golf, and Riding Hero, and launched it in Japan that April: the MVS on April 16 and the AES on April 26. North America followed with the MVS in August 1990 and the AES on July 1, 1991.

The MVS (Multi Video System) was the arcade form: a board fitted with one, two, four, or six cartridge slots, so one cabinet could offer a shelf of games and an operator could change the lineup with a swap instead of a new machine. SNK's own account puts the cost of a new MVS cartridge at about US$500, less than half the cost of a traditional dedicated arcade unit. The AES (Advanced Entertainment System) was the home form: a single slot console running identical hardware, a Motorola 68000 at 12 MHz with a Zilog Z80 coprocessor, a Yamaha YM2610 sound chip, and up to 3,840 colors on screen from a palette of 65,536. SNK marketed the pair as the first 24-bit system, a claim that rests on the graphics data bus; the CPU itself is a 16/32-bit part.

The two forms even shared a memory card: a game saved in the arcade could be continued on the home console. What they did not share was the cartridge shell, a deliberate split this Library answers on its own page: why an MVS cartridge will not fit in an AES.

The AES began in Japan as the Neo Geo Rental System: SNK judged its manufacturing cost too high for retail and offered it for rent to commercial establishments such as hotels, bars, and restaurants. Customer response reversed the decision. People said they would pay, so SNK sold it, in North America first as a planned $599 bundle and then at $649.99 as the Gold System, with two joystick controllers and a pack-in game (Baseball Stars Professional or NAM-1975 at first, Magician Lord in a later bundle), while a $399.99 Silver System offered one controller and no game. Individual games sold at about $200 and up. Adjusted for inflation, it was the most expensive home console ever released at the time. The economics still worked for SNK, because the AES needed no porting or separate marketing: the MVS library fed it automatically. The full price story is on the price question page.

Cartridges kept growing under the hood. The original specification allowed up to 330 megabits, announced on the startup screen as Max 330 Mega Pro-Gear Spec; games past 100 megabits celebrated with a 100 Mega Shock animation, and later bank switching raised the ceiling to about 716 megabits under a Giga Power banner. The MVS sold about one million units worldwide and was one of three recipients of the American Amusement Machine Association's Diamond Award in 1995, an award based strictly on sales. SNK stopped manufacturing home consoles at the end of 1997, tried a CD based successor (the Neo Geo CD, 1994) and a 3D one (the Hyper Neo Geo 64, 1997), and watched both fail to catch on, yet kept publishing for the original 2D system anyway. The last official SNK game, Samurai Shodown V Special, arrived in 2004, which makes the Neo Geo the longest supported arcade system of all time. SNK ended maintenance and repairs for the hardware on August 31, 2007.

What happened to the company behind it is a separate, stranger story, and it has its own page: what happened to SNK after it went bankrupt.