Kamina:
The short time I've been here (though I haven't been posting much), I've been hearing about disputes between SNK Playmore and an organization called "Neo Geo Freak". I did a search and it appears that there was some legal stuff going on, but since I don't feel like reading through dozens of pages of posts, would anyone mind giving me just a basic rundown of what happened and what the end result was?
Thanks.
- It began as Dion Dakis and Chris Ray; two very passionate, but very unscrupulous collectors (an analogy to the "dark side" is not without warrant)
- They started to cheat people by selling copies of very expensive rare carts (in an already expensive area)
- They formed the company "Neo Geo Freak" at a later date, based out of Dion's home in Las Vegas (this is a side business for them, they have real lives outside of this -as to a lot of the other folks on this side -though you'd sometimes never guess it, eh?)
- NGF continued their style of selling bootleg and pirate copies of rare home games at astronomical prices.
- When finally confronted by the greater Neo community about their attempts at passing fakes as genuine, they changed their story into claiming that their "Corrected" carts were much better than the SNK originals. Some extremely compulsive collectors continued to buy from them under that guise. Others just said "if I'm paying out the ass for a video game, I want the geniune product, and I'm definitely not paying twice as much for it"
- A lot of NGF's release were "unreleased" games: They would take an MVS-only release, remove the chips, put them in a sacraficial cart (sac cart) and then make a new insert, usually based off of the arcade flyers. This process is called conversion and destroys one game for every game made. This is illegal, as you do not have permission to alter games that you purchase for resale in this manner -since you are using copywriten art for the inserts (this is part of the reason they got in trouble).
- NGF apparently managed to get rights to a limited run of US KOF 2000 carts. However, no side can give a 100% about the actual games they sold. It appears that the carts were legit, but they may have altered the inserts. It's a messy situation and virtually everyone avoids the US KOF 2k because of the controversy. They also tried to sell it for unbelievably high amounts. SNK went under during this time, so their records are also sketchy (SNK's executive staff and founder later reformed as Playmore in S. Korea).
- Once SNK-Playmore (they restored the SNK name after legal wrangling with a company in Japan) reformed in the US, they went after bootleggers. SNK USA solicited a Shock Troopers 1 home cart from NGF (a game that was MVS only) and NGF sold it to them. This gave SNK the ability to haul NGF into court and give them the grief that the Neo Geo Community by-and-large (analogous to world-v.-Saddam Hussein) agreed that they had coming for a long, long time.
- Thankfully, the suit helped bring NGF out of their wilder antics, and they are relegated soliciting privately, spamming the DHP, and going to local expos in Las Vegas (Dion's home town).
Essentially, NGF attempted, unsuccessfully, to fill the void left by the temporary demise of SNK. They hoped to profiteer off of people who didn't know better (and they were able to in some cases) but once SNK arrive again -it went right after them. Funny, guess that tells you that they're not exactly good for the company they claim to support through their history of copies, conversions, and assorted bootlegging and piracy.
