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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."
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).
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"
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
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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.
No, see, Duke Nukum was released in 1991, while Metal Slug wasn't released until 1996. However, if you are talking about Duke Nukem 3D, which was also released in 1996, albeit January 29th, you still could not say that Metal Slug X, which was released in 1999, was its its influence.
Same with the characters. Marco (one of the two guys you could pick in Metal Slug X, and the only character in Metal Slug), was invisioned way after Duke Nukum had been released.
So, either Duke Nukum influenced the Metal Slug series, or there was no influence at all.
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.
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.
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.