Straight from the arcade world, the Neo Geo was, without a doubt, the most expensive hardware of the 4th generation. This begs the question: how capable was it and how did it compare with the rest?
In this entry, we’ll take a look at the result of one company (SNK) setting budget restrictions aside and shipping a product meant to please both arcade owners and rich households.
Rodrigo Copetti
Rich households, indeed. Back in the ’90s, when Nintendo was the only game in town – few people in my area cared one bit about Sega – Neo Geo was a name we only knew of vaguely. It was supposed to be a massively powerful console that was so expensive nobody bought one, and some of us even doubted it was real in the first place. Ah, the pre-internet playground days were wild.
That’s how it was here too. I grew up in a small town of about 8,000 people, and one high school. At school we only knew of one fellow student who had a Neo Geo, and unsurprisingly his dad was one of the wealthiest in town. He got it at launch which was the summer before we started ninth grade, and suddenly he was the most popular kid across the cliques. I never got to see his console or play on it, but I was lucky enough to have a SNES while my neighbor had a Sega Genesis, so I wasn’t wanting for games to play.
I love these deep dives by Rodrigo, they are nerd nirvana!
Neo Geo was the system we played at Babbages in the Mall while our parents shopped elsewhere. I suspect there was another variant for demos, that also rebooted itself every 10 minutes or so. somehow making use of the watchdog. Makes me feel a little better to know that watchdogs existed in other products besides the one I worked on. C programming is hard, lets go shopping.
Haha Babbage’s, what an ancient reference. It was the goto place for computers and we had to travel quite a ways to get to one.
Never saw a Neo Geo console in person, but played plenty of Neo Geo arcade cabinets! Those things were crazy. Fun, hard, exciting games with so much happening onscreen without being a blurry mess.
There are Neo Geo home arcade cabinets with dozens of games installed that I would love to buy … if only the wife was a gamer and would approve the expense.
Didn’t they also have a portable for a while? Or was that TurboGrafx?
There was the NeoGeo Pocket – quite a different thing.
Come on guys, is it for real?