Neo Geo

Neo Geo Specifications

The Neo Geo is a cartridge-based arcade and home video game system released on July 1, 1991 by Japanese game company SNK. Being in the Fourth generation of Gaming, it was the first console in the former Neo Geo family, which only lived through the 1990s. The hardware featured comparatively colourful 2D graphics.

The MVS (Multi Video System), as the Neo Geo was known to the coin-op industry, offered arcade operators the ability to put up to 6 different arcade titles into a single cabinet, a key economic consideration for operators with limited floorspace. With its games stored on self-contained cartridges, a game-cabinet could be exchanged for a different game-title by swapping the game's ROM-cartridge and cabinet artwork. Several popular franchise-series, including Fatal Fury, The King of Fighters, Metal Slug and Samurai Shodown, were released for the platform.

The Neo Geo system was also marketed as a very costly home console, commonly referred to today as the AES (Advanced Entertainment System). The Neo Geo was marketed as 24-bit, though it was technically a parallel processing 16-bit system with an 8-bit Zilog Z80 as coprocessor. The coprocessor was used as a CPU, and for sound processing. The Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis also had similar co-processors, with neither Sega nor Nintendo claiming they were 24-bit.

Both the MVS and AES were powerful for the time, and the Neo Geo MVS was successful with arcade operators worldwide. However, while the AES allows for fully authentic versions of games released for the MVS, the high price for both the AES console and its games prevented it from directly competing with its contemporaries, the Sega Genesis, Super NES, and TurboGrafx-16.

Years later, SNK released the Neo Geo CD, a more cost-effective console with games released on compact discs. The console was met with limited success, due in part to its slow CD-ROM drive. In an attempt to compete with increasingly popular 3D games, SNK released the Hyper Neo Geo 64 arcade system in 1997 as the successor to its aging MVS. The system did not fare well and only a few games were released for it. A planned home console based on the hardware was never released. SNK later extended the brand by releasing a handheld console, the Neo Geo Pocket, which was quickly succeeded by the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Soon after their release, however, SNK encountered various legal and financial issues resulting in a sale of the company and discontinuation of the handheld. Despite that, the original Neo Geo MVS and AES continued receiving new games under new ownership until officially being discontinued in 2004, ending the brand.

Regardless of the failure of later Neo Geo hardware, games for the original MVS and AES have been well received. The system spawned several long-running and critically acclaimed series, mostly 2D fighters, including Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Samurai Shodown, The Last Blade, World Heroes, and The King of Fighters, as well as popular games in other genres such as the Metal Slug, Twinkle Star Sprites and Baseball Stars series. In December 2012, SNK Playmore released a handheld console based on the original AES, the Neo Geo X. As of March 1997, the Neo Geo had sold 980,000 units worldwide. The Neo Geo Pocket Color also has been given praise for multiple innovations, and a very substantial library, despite its short life.