What Happened to SNK After It Went Bankrupt?
The original SNK Corporation, founded by Eikichi Kawasaki in Osaka on July 22, 1978 as Shin Nihon Kikaku, was declared bankrupt on October 30, 2001 with about 38 billion yen of debt. The company that makes SNK games today is legally its successor, not the same corporation: Kawasaki's Playmore won the auction for SNK's intellectual property, renamed itself SNK Playmore in 2003, and dropped the Playmore name entirely in 2016.
HOW IT FAILED
Arcades faded, the rescues misfiredSNK had bet the 1990s on arcades just as the market turned toward home and portable consoles and 3D graphics. Its answers missed: the Neo Geo CD and the 3D Hyper Neo Geo 64 both failed to meet expectations, the Neo Geo Pocket fell behind after the Game Boy Color arrived, a Neo Geo World amusement park in Tokyo Bayside lost attendance within months and is recorded as a massive failure, and third party home console titles such as Koudelka and Cool Cool Toon sold poorly. In January 2000 the pachinko company Aruze acquired SNK; instead of developing games from its franchises, Aruze built pachinko machines featuring series such as The King of Fighters, and SNK saw little success in the game market. SNK closed its American, Canadian, and European operations on June 13, 2000, staff scattered to rivals and to the new studio BrezzaSoft, and on April 2, 2001, carrying about 38 billion yen in debt, SNK gave up voluntary reconstruction and applied for civil rehabilitation in the Osaka District Court. The court abolished those proceedings on October 1, 2001 and declared the company bankrupt on October 30.
THE PLAYMORE MANEUVER
Founded August 1, 2001; buyer by October 30Playmore Corporation was established on August 1, 2001, originally an SNK affiliate working in copyright management; the record is careful to say it would be incorrect to call it the old company's predecessor. When the bankrupt SNK's intellectual property went to bid, Playmore won it, on the same October 30, 2001 timeline as the bankruptcy declaration. In the gap, the franchises were licensed out: BrezzaSoft and South Korea's Eolith handled The King of Fighters, and Korea's Mega Enterprise produced Metal Slug 4. Playmore then reabsorbed the diaspora, acquiring BrezzaSoft and its former SNK developers plus the Neo Geo developer Noise Factory, and in July 2003, with Kawasaki's permission and the SNK trademark reacquired from Aruze, it renamed itself SNK Playmore Corporation. That same year it bought ADK, the Magician Lord studio, shortly after ADK itself filed for bankruptcy. The new company employed many of the people who had left in 2001 and occupied the old company's building. Kawasaki also sued Aruze for using the reacquired properties without authorization, claiming 6.2 billion yen; a preliminary Osaka District Court decision in January 2004 favored SNK Playmore and awarded 5.64 billion yen.
The afterlife kept going: SNK Playmore left the pachislot business in November 2015 to refocus on games, dropped the Playmore name on December 1, 2016 to stand simply as SNK Corporation again, released the Neo Geo Mini in 2018, and since 2022 has been owned by the Electronic Gaming Development Company, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's MiSK Foundation. The games this shelf documents, Metal Slug among them, are the catalog that survived the auction.