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GameSpot Recaps 25-Year History of SNK
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "GameSpot has offered up an amazingly in-depth history of SNK -- the company behind such classic games as Ikari Warriors, Fatal Fury, and King of Fighters, as well as the NeoGeo hardware system. The 39-page retrospective covers nearly every aspect of the company's 25-year history and includes an annotated list of key SNK titles, trivia, insider interviews, hardware comparisons, screenshots, promotional art, and more."
i always love to read stuff like this. takes me back some years... oh the nostalgy :'(
ikari warriors ruled!
They simply made _THE BEST_ 2D fighting games, ever. :)
They were unique and stylish, as always.. SNK shall live on!
To think a game company could consistently make and evolve a series of games for 25 years is impressive. My hats off to them.
Some argue it's still the greatest baseball game ever made. I'd say it's at least the best one made in the 20th century.
Some of the best games of all time have been on SNK systems or by SNK. The Metal Slug series is still fun to this day; few games hold up so well for so long. I remember playing Magician Lord for hours at the local pizzeria as a kid, while the Street Fighter 2 machine was always occupied. They didn't know what they were missing out on.
SNK still makes great games. Garou: Mark of the Wolves was a revolutionary 2d fighting game, excellent in every aspect.
Surely the wealth of talent that is/was SNK hasn't been depleted. Has no one considered tapping into them as a development house? Granted, their forte is the 2D fighting game, but the creativity and originality infused into those games is something that can be applied to any genre. With the crap being shipped out of studios these days, you'd think the more savvy publishing CEOs would be on top of this.
I think Crystalis was one of my favourite Nintendo games. It also never seemed to be very popular either. Maybe the company is cursed?
I scanned in a few of the Neo Geo advertisements and promotional material a while back. Propaganda is fun.
http://xodnizel.net/neogeo/
Back when I was at school, no-one had ever played on a NeoGeo, but we'd all heard about it. It was the amazing 'latest thing' which was supposedly so amazing to play on that it'd beat your NES into a pulp, and was even better than the arcades. As young boys we drooled over this concept, but never came close to one as they were about $700 in this country. Several years later I tried NeoGeo on emulation, and while Street Fighter 2 was particularly well done, it was a bit of a let down compared to what we'd all been thinking as kids.
Funny how it goes.. you grow older, and you don't have that whole excitement because you can just buy any technology/console you want to check out instead of dreaming about owning it 'one day'. Sadly it seems almost more fun dreaming about how incredible something is than actually getting to use it.
I'd hesitate to say that 3DO was seen in a similar light to the NeoGeo, as they also had a mythical expensive console out in the early 90's (which was 32 bit ARM-RISC with a CD-ROM).
somehow, the standard controllers that were given with the XBox on their launch seems very small compared to the original joysticks you got with the NeoGeo.
The NeoGeo actually felt like bringing the arcade coin-ops in your home , allthough it has never reached any recognition over here (the Netherlands).
This is fucking weird. I just bought Capcom Vs. SNK2: EO for Xbox from a used movie store. It's an *amazing* game that brings back memories of all the SNK characters of yore.
I'm so into SNK now that I'm kind of becoming a collector *sigh*. Yes I know, how American of me, collect and buy and stock up, but I have so much fun with the SNK characters and reminiscing. In fact, I found the original game artwork pulled from a dedicated POW machine on eBay in an auction. I may buy it. It includes the complete control panel, monitor bezel, and marquee, all in great condition.
Anyway, sorry to ramble, I'm just totally into SNK, and this article was excellent.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Just got to thinking, what are the chances that Metal Slug X was the influence for Duke Nukem? I mean, rakish hero fighting alien bastards? Hardly an original plot premise, but Duke's "attitude" seems to be a natural progression of the Metal Slug Guy's tough-man image :)
The thing I don't know is, what came first - MSX or DN3D? Perhaps the influence was actually the other way around?
-JT
One of the most mainstream gaming review sites in recent memory is now doing a heartfelt article on SNK? I don't buy it for an instant. It'd be like IGN doing some actual research before they publish something (their "Nintendo DS" articles with web message board joke images springs to mind).
"...see you at the crossroads"
He has claimed to be on faculty at Slaughter College (doesn't EXIST), Howard Community College (NOT on faculty) as a professor of Computer Science.
In reality, he is a karma whore. He posts "Me, too!" and "Attaboy!" posts in hopes of building up sufficient karma to troll some more. Check posting history, mods, and above all CHECK HIS FACTS before upmodding at all.
OK. So Amsterdamn Vallon is pretending to be someone who he isnt.
If he comments on the article, provides an opinion, and doesn't actually troll, who cares? Why shouldn't he be modded up?
It seems some people on Slashdot have nothing better to do than to enforce their views of social interaction and spend countless hours trying to take other people down for such silly reasons.
Sasuke Vs Commander, which was SNK's first color machine.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
Sound channels in http://xodnizel.net/neogeo/VideoGameWeenie.jpg
. jpg
:(
Lists Neo Geo as 15, TG16 as 10, and Sega Genesis as 8.
Yet http://xodnizel.net/neogeo/Specifications%20Sheet
Lists Neo Geo as 15, Genesis as 10, SNES as 8, and TG16 as 6.
Quite the difference!
The other specs also change seemingly randomly. It's quite the bad-ol'-days FUD that video game companies slung around before they learned that all they had to do was release PR about how their new Emotio^WCELL chip would rock, and let their devoted fan-boys do the rest of the work for them.
The proof's in the games, and these advertisements are the kind of things that cater to people who want to make up for a small penis with game console specs, not people who love games. Sad, really
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Man, I love that game. I still own my second copy, though the box is pretty worn out. Got it for cheap at Ames in the middle of nowhere. The game was fun- like, easily as much fun as The Legend of Zelda or The Secret of Mana. I put it up there with River City Ransom on my list of favorite NES games.
:|
And for some reason, they never made a sequel, never made a SNES version, never made anything similar.
Anyone remember that game?
Was hyped as the second coming of the classical isometric shooter, produced only a few 1000 times and sold for more than a SNES+Megadrive combined?
And after all, it was only an "okay" game, but who would admit after spending 200$+?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Considered, yes. Threw it right out, though. You're too obviously a karma whore, and if you really were a computer science prof who wanted to hide it, you wouldn't pretend to be one at a non-existent institution, or at one where you don't really teach.
And exactly what IS a speaker for IEEE?
Dude, the only thing you're a professional at is karma whore. I've checked your facts before, and you lie like a rug on a regular basis. YOU ARE A TROLL.
I figured out the Gangs of New York thing a while ago. Simply continues to make my point.
I have a life. Mine doesn't center around trying to raise my karma on Slashdot.
Baseball Stars, the game that started my love for micro-management in sports games. It was advanced for it's time. It had salaries and trading! :)
Ikari Warriors - Responsible for my love for violent games
and of course Crystalis, was one of the better rpg's of its time, oh the time I spent.
I can feel your pain. Pissed me off, too.
And such things seem only to happen if border and text have the same color...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I've been a fan of SNK since I played Fatal Fury at a local arcade. After that, I would purchase most of their SNES porting efforts, even if those ports sucked because of extreme size-reduced sprites. Then the golden days came along with my Sega Saturn, importing classics like the King of Fighters Collector's Edition (95-97), Real Bout Fatal Fury collector's edition, Metal Slug, etc. Dreamcast came, and so did Last Blade 2, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, and Capcom vs SNK, which was basically a dream-come-true for me.
Nowadays, though, the talent looks like it is pretty much gone. No more sweet arranged music for the home versions of KoF, and they're only just now switching to the Atomis Engine (Sammy's fighting game engine, seen in the extremely popular Guilty Gear series) to hopefully abandon the woeful graphics the series currently suffers from. Compare KoF 2000/2001 for the Playstation 2 to KoF 97 on the Saturn - they look the same, but the 97 version just has that added detail of polish, in presentation, music, etc. The hits seem harder, the desparation-moves look cooler, and it just adds to a more fun experience while playing.
Hopefully Playmore will remember that the little details help make a good gaming experience. Not stuff like giving Kim Kaphwan more frames of animation just because he's Korean [note: Playmore is Korean].
Back to playing my KoF97...hoping for a return of SNK's former glory.
my parents stopped purchasing game systems after the NES because they didn't understand why I needed a new one when the one I had still worked (and had hundreds of games I didn't own..)
First explanation you should have tried: Because try finding one NES game at Wal-Mart after 1993. I'm in a similar position with my PlayStation 1; I can't seem to save enough money after expenses to buy a PS2, and Sony has terminated PS1 development.
The largest Genesis/MD cart (that I know of) was 5 MB, not 4. (I'm referring to Super Street Fighter II.)
The playstation has 1MB of video RAM and 512k of sound RAM in addition to the 2MB of work RAM.
The PS2 has 32MB of system memory.
That's what is loaded from the CD/DVDROM. Think of how much video RAM you would need to run at 640x480...(not much).
If they would just use a faster DVD drive it could probably cut those load times down considerably. A mod I've always dreamed of doing...
For the slow loading times do not forget the original PSX used a 1x speed CD-ROM drive.
:)
Secondly, in the console world, 2MB is quite a lot. On the GBA for example there's 96k of VRAM, 32k of fast cache IWRAM, and 256k of EWRAM. Adds up to 384k of total RAM in the GBA. And that's considered quite a lot!
There's lots of tricks you can do, including texture and geometry streaming, that lets one play around with a lot more data than what would fit into RAM at any one time.
The article makes no mention of The Last Blade or its sequel. They're my two favorites from SNK's fighting lineup. Having the ability to reverse an opponent's attack really spices up the gameplay and makes it work like no other game I've played. Also, I didn't notice the Art of Fighting series, either. They're real good games, too. Don't get me wrong, it's still a great article and well worth a read for any SNK fanboy.
This wasn't the most popular SNK game....but damn, did it kick ass. The level of detail was amazing for a shooter. The only point of the game was to blow shit up, a point driven home by the fact that it was trivial to respawn infinitely. The explosions often bordered on self-parody. Half the time, the NES would slow down as it strained to render them.
>Hopefully Playmore will remember that the
>little details help make a good gaming
>experience. Not stuff like giving Kim Kaphwan
>more frames of animation just because he's
>Korean [note: Playmore is Korean].
Hah? Playmore is Japanese pachinko/slotmachine maker.
Where's the end? I wanted to know what the heck happened to SNK? Did they go out of business? Did they get bought out by someone else? See below for "The End" to this good story:
Finally, not long after its first release, the Neo Geo Pocket was on its way to follow the Hyper 64 into the great void of defunct video game systems and was officially abandoned in late 2000.
All these of SNK's adventures finally lead to a financial desaster. Unable to pay the bills, SNK tried to find an investor. At the same time, when the word of SNK's economical breakdown had spread throughout the gaming world, several third parties began to show interest in the companies' treasures.
It has to be said that the company we all were referring to as "SNK" up to and until 2001 actually was the core of SNK ASIA LTD, the once proud corporation which also did most of their hardware construction themselves. In 1999, the inner sanctum SNK decidet to close all the Asian branches, including the hardware departement, and to get rid of the Neo Geo World merchandise, a chain of amusement centers with themes and artwork from SNK's universe in Japan. All the financially negative projects had finally taken their toll.
On of these "interested third parties" were Aruze, a Patchinko company, one of Japan's most popular amusement machines. They signalled that they'd support SNK by taking over parts of their debts. It sounded too good to be true, but soon several SNK executives and Aruze managers confered about a possible "friendly take over" of SNK by Aruze. With lots of concern, but without a real chance to escape their kismet, SNK finally nodded, and Aruze jumped aboard.
Dark day in SNK
Aruze had promised to keep away from running projects and the overall SNK philosophy. As we know now, sequels to highly successful series like Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury/Garou Densetsou were planned and partly under developement, but as it were, Aruze appruptly closed all projects and went to make their bucks with SNK's family silver, the intellectual properties of series like The King of Fighters or Samurai Shodown. It seemed that Aruze just wanted to boost their Patchinko biz by liquidating SNK's most valuable licenses. After a while, some SNK executives came to the same conclusion, and finally went into the boardroom, only to witness that the whole board had been fittet with Aruze-friendly staff.
Although it was planned that SNK moved over to Aruze's properties, SNK suddenly stopped the process and returned to Osaka, while trying to regain control over the general direction of the corporation. Meanwhile, Aruze's share holders began to grumble about the way Aruze treated SNK and their funny little video game licenses. They wanted to see profits, but felt that parts of the Aruze board worked against the interest of SNK and thus against the share holders. It has to be noted that not only Aruze executives were suspected to work against the interest of SNK, but also about five SNK managers who rather wanted to sell all the stuff and retire than to fight against bancruptcy.
The whole thing escalated with the filling of suit against Aruze by the share holders, accusing the company of a loss of more than 27.5 billion Yen. But the ship was sinking already. Throughout the whole year 2000 and the first half of 2001, SNK fought for their life, but it was too late; in October 2001, events culminated in the bankruptcy of SNK parent company. Requiescat in pace.
Aruze, unwilling to go to court, tried (and prolly still try) to find a compromise. Yet, all of a sudden, two of the possibly sold SNK IPs of Metal Slug and The King of Fighters licenses showed up - Eolith announced their King of Fighters 2001, while the Korean company MegaKing all of a sudden opened a Metal Slug 4 web site. Looking through the tears of despair about the death of SNK, the Neo fans couldn't believe their eyes. The synergy that resulted from this however lead to a new frontier. BrezzaSoft, about to develop a new ar
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
You're not going to get very much info, because of NDAs, but Playstation had it's own compression algorthm for textures This is partly responsible for the playstation "look" on many of the textures.
One important thing you're missing here is streaming. You don't need to load everything off the disc, because you can stream texture and music, and get rid of it as soon as it's used..
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
I don't particularly like beat-em-ups, but I've got to admit that SNK had the balls to release the arcade PCB for the home market. At the time I prayed for SEGA to release a sprite scaler console for the home (which they didn't!!! they were masters of 3d sprite scaling games back then!!!), SNK came out of nowhere and made us dream about playing arcade-quality games at home!!! (the SNES and Genesis were cool machines, but nowhere near as powerful as Outrun, Space Harrier, Afterburner and other Sega milestones).
I'm thinking of starting a collection of import DC games... Cool Cool Toon's one of those at the top of my list.
Excellent, :)
Thanks for all the answers.
I just remember now that I could play the music from the games in my CD player.
Growing up I had a friend from a wealthy family who was lucky enough to have this system (and a TG16 CD/SNES/Genesis/Amiga) with a pretty decent library of games. Graphically impressive at the time, but the games had little replay value (AoF and SS were exceptions). Gameplay wise it couldn't compare to the best of the SNES or Genesis. I mean SFII for SNES was light years ahead gameplay wise over FF and WH
Classic's are pacman, donkey kong, etc.
After reading 39 pages of Gamespot coverage on SNK, it is safe to say that while we love the games, the garbled, translated-from-Japanese storylines of some SNK releases are better written than this article. Please, Gamespot--write for the fans, but do it coherently and edit it for clarity before publishing.
-m
Those were the days. There was an Ikari Warriors machine in the Union Building at my university -- we also had Ghosts and Goblins, and der Asteroidenmaschinen (which had been nobbled by sparkers so many times it was stuck in German mode, or so the story ran).
Ikari Warriors was performance art. You'd throw a grenade as the enemies ambushed you, and if you timed it right you'd get half a dozen of them evenly spaced across the screen, all going into their spin-around-and-fall-over death animation simultaneously. We used to call that one the North Vietnamese Formation Dying Team.
Ah, nostalgia.
It is a woman's prerogative to change other people's minds.
People who are saying SNK produced some of the best games of all time are just plain insane. They made great games, and they lasted thru so many bit wars. Hats off to SNK.
But given the technology of Neo Geo at the time and the price they were charging, the last thing we want to see is a street fighter clone. This machine should have destroyed the competition.
Instead it didn't remotely come close.
The scaling effect was the most over utilized effect I have ever seen. A system with this advanced of a color palette was wasted with cartoon games everywhere using minimal colors. The marketing and finance team had to be on crack to charge 4x more than any other system at the time. It certainly wasn't even 2x better than SNES or genesis.
By the end of the decade, the dominance of "chop sukey" games dealt the final blow. And around the same time rap music was putting the 80's-tyle pop music genre to death. Together, "chop sukey" and rap music killed the magic that was the 1980's.
"Rapper's Delight": Sugarhill Gang, 1979
"The Message": Grandmaster Flash, 1982
"Planet Rock": Afrika Bambaataa, 1982
"Rock Box": Run-DMC, 1984
"Roxanne, Roxanna": UTFO, 1984
"Fight For Your Right": Beastie Boys, 1986
Yeah, rap music sure did come around at the end of the 80s and kill it dead. Just imagine what A Flock of Seagulls could have achieved if it hadn't been for those meddling negros!
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Don't put SNK on too high a pedestal. They are nothing next to street fighter. STREET FIGHTER.
STREET FIGHTER.
The 'Atomis engine' is just new arcade hardware, a la the NeoGeo. Nothing fighting game specific. I believe it is just a slightly modified Sega Naomi system (which powered the first Guilty Gear X, among dozens of other games like Crazy Taxi). In fact, it looks like it is just a less powerful (!) version, roughly equivalent to a stock Dreamcast. Bizarre that they would use something like that - the Naomi can't be that much more expensive, especially now. Perhaps Sega didn't want to license something completely equivalent to their system? Either way, an excellent system in terms of price/performance, but nothing too advanced, either.
(If you look at that page, the Dolphin Blue game is apparently some kind of spiritual successor to Metal Slug. Very cool. What is also pretty cool is that since DC/Naomi emulators are getting close to primetime, Atomiswave should also be easily doable. Bad for business perhaps, but I know the odds of me seeing a new arcade machine like that around here is frighteningly low. Home ports would also be very welcome...)
And I forget the exact details, but you are correct that the people involved with the KOF series currently are Korean. The developers (Eolis?), maybe? And I do think they did a pretty nice visual job on the 2k3 version - it just feels a little faster and more exciting to me than other games in the series.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
I just wrote the following e-mail to the author of the article:
:-)
Hello Frank,
I just read your SNK article on GameSpot.com. A very nice in-depth article!
Although, I think you forgot to mention that SNK also produced software for the MSX system, which is virtually unknown in the USA, but used to be very popular in Japan and certain parts of Europe, as well as Brazil.
For some more information about this home computer system, you might want to check out these sites:
The Ultimate MSX FAQ
The MSX Resource Center
The only MSX product of SNK I know is Ikari Warriors. For some information about the game, see this page: Ikari Warriors on Generation MSX.
In short: it was released in 1987 for the MSX2 system (the second generation standard of MSX). It's a 2Mbit game.
Some scans of the cover in a higher resolution: front, back, side.
I'm also in posession of this game myself.
I hope you will update the article!
(At least pages 2 (near the bottom) and page 31 should mention the MSX port of Ikari Warriors, I think.
Just as rap did not define Blondie's catalog, neither did seven songs define a decade's music.