We were in the same market as other competitors, but we had two ways of getting capital. We had this idea that we were going to make these arcade cabinets - but it was about bringing that entertainment home. Nobuyuki Kuroki: Before the Neo Geo came it was never as if we were going to directly compete. When it launched in 1990, the Neo Geo AES was several leagues ahead of the competition in terms of sheer grunt, its cutting edge visuals making some of the most iconic games of the era possible.
The masterstroke would come when SNK decided to bring the arcade home with the Advanced Entertainment System. There's a lot of motivation to make these big bombastic games as well. That led to people at SNK - producers, directors - getting more ambitious and making more games because they were experiencing this big rise. And so that led to this rapid expansion, especially in the fighting game scene, and arcades in general. It didn't experience that kind of implosion, like what happened with the States and the game crash in 1983. Even though Japan experienced the end of the bubble economy, the games industry was actually doing really, really well. And so a lot of people found themselves instead investing a lot more time into games, going to arcade centres. A lot of people were suddenly out of a job, and the economy tanked. Naoto Abe: In the 80s, you had the bubble economy in Japan, and all industry was riding really high on that. It was with the invention of the MVS, though, that SNK entered what many see as its golden era, the modular arcade cabinet that allowed operators to swap cartridges in and out proving remarkably successful. SNK was formed in 1973, going on to make its name in the arcades of the early 80s with the likes of Ikari Warriors, Athena and Alpha Mission (a period wonderfully chronicled in 2018's excellent SNK 40th Anniversary Collection that shines a light on the company's earlier work).
The company changed hands over the years, and changed its strategy in the process, moving from pachinko machines to compilations and new takes on established properties, but it wasn't until 2016 that fully glory was restored, the SNK name being retained alongside that iconic tagline 'The Future is Now'. SNK slipped into the shadows at the turn of the century, the collapse of the fighting genre which was its main trade as well as the commercial failure of the Neo Geo leading to its bankruptcy in 2001. Maybe it's how relatively unobtainable they were to contemporary audiences - the console came in at around £500 while games would cost up to £200 a piece - or maybe it's how it arrived just before 3D gaming took hold, its 2D action titles still standing out as a high watermark for the form, but the Neo Geo's appeal hasn't dulled in all the years since. Sega and Nintendo stole the headlines in the 90s, but SNK stole the imaginations of a generation with its exquisite Neo Geo machine, a console that fully delivered on the promise of arcade quality video games in your own home: it was, after all, an arcade machine you could effectively put under your own TV.įirst released in its full-spec MVS arcade cabinet before the home version - dubbed the AES, or Advanced Entertainment System - followed early in 1990, the Neo Geo still stands out as a console with an allure all of its own.