It seems like yesterday but thirty years have already passed. We were young and today we are retiring. It was better when it was worse! And Neo Geo CD was coming out at the time.
100 Mega Shocks!
Thirty years ago the bitmap reigned supreme and polygons appeared for the first time, timidly, even on the screens of our domestic TVs. And it was precisely with two-dimensional graphics in mind that there was a company that dominated arcades, especially in the field of fighting games (but not only). Those of you who remember the arrogant, domineering and brazen “100 Mega Shock!” who led at the beginning of every SNK game in the arcade? How many of you craved it on your TV? Unfortunately only very few could afford the luxury of owning the wonderful Neo Geo and his very expensive cartridges of half a kidney each.
The attempt to make the brand more popular
Precisely because of the very high cost of the ROM cartridges with which the wonderful Neo Geo was equipped (which, let’s remember, equipped a Motorola 6800 chip: the same as the Atari Jaguar, Sega Megadrive and Sega Saturn for the audio part), the manufacturer SNK wanted enter head-on into the very rich home market dominated at the time by Nintendo and SEGA. At the time it enjoyed certain fame and popularity in the more underground circuit of passionate gamers, while it was practically unknown to the mass public who usually stocked up in shopping centres. The use of cartridges had its undisputed advantages, so much so that competitor Nintendo offered them until the release of the GameCube in 2001 (its first console with an optical reader): excessive speed in loading and a big headache for those who wanted to violate it in a pirate way.
The history of optical media
With the Neo Geo CD, not only the history of consoles was made, but also that of the “new” digital optical medium. Although it is generally known and established that the first manufacturer to think of this format was Nintendo and that with this idea it indirectly contributed to the birth of Playstation, in reality the release dates on the market indicate the SNK machine as the very first to see light on the shelves of Japanese stores: on September 9, 1994 the lucky owners of this wonderful hardware began inserting CDs into the tray for the first time instead of cartridges. SAW arrived very shortly after, on November 22nd, while Sony PlayStation launched on December 2nd. All in the space of three months. SNK confirmed itself as one of the most innovative and technological producers on the market, and with it its video games always “one step higher” in terms of quantity and quality of its 2D sprites.
The exclusive question
The software park of Neo GeoCD it never really took off, stopping at just under one hundred titles (which, in any case, were not exactly few considering the limited capacity of the software house in economic and structural terms). Among the most commercially successful games, they were particularly appreciated by critics and the public Metal SlugPuzzle Bobble and Neo Drift Out: New Technology, but there were just eight exclusive titles (including Crossed Swords II which had some success).
His unhappy fate
Despite SNK’s efforts to produce a console with a more accessible price than the previous machine, also reducing software production costs by adopting the much cheaper CD Rom, it was precisely because of this latest technology that the Japanese company’s forecasts were negatively distorted. The games had infinite loading times and suffered from an optical drive capable of running at a speed of only 1x, effectively demolishing one of the peculiarities that distinguished the games SNK on cartridge: be absolutely quick to start and very fast in loading. The lower cost of the supports (and therefore of the entire game for the end customer) was not enough to push towards the success of this wonderful yet unfortunate console, relegating it to the Olympus of the old glories of the past: Neo GeoCD it sold just over half a million pieces.
Tags: Happy Birthday NeoGeo years historic SNK console released
