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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."
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 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).
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
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