What are your earliest memories of the Neo Geo? I have so many early memories of Neo Geo, but you have to remember in the 90’s in the United States arcades were still pretty common. This was a time when a line for a popular game could be 20 deep with hungry teenagers whose pockets were full of a week of saved lunch money. Neo Geo was literally everywhere! I would go to the grocery store with my parents and Ninja Combat was there. When I would go to the laundry mat with my parents, Metal Slug was there. When I would sneak deeper into town than I was supposed to, crossing dangerous intersections against the will of my parents, it was because League Bowling, Samurai Shodown II, and Neo Geo were there at the bowling alley! There are two early Neo Geo memories that stick with me the most though. The first is Super Saturday at Putt Putt Golf n’ Games in Springfield, Ohio. Every Saturday my mom and my aunt would drop myself, my cousin Kevin, and our best friend Martez off while they went to the mall. For $10.00 you would get 2 rounds of Putt Putt, and more importantly 100 tokens to play video games in the arcade. This is where I first discovered games like Magician Lord, Samurai Shodown, and Nam 1975. These are staples of the early games in the library, that almost every Neo Geo fan cherish. That time in my life, in that stuffy arcade full of stinky teenagers “running the sticks” is not only one of my most memorable Neo Geo memories, but one of my happiest childhood memories. Super Saturday was the best!
My second memory of the Neo Geo actually came quite a few years later, around 1999. This is when I was finally able to afford a Neo Geo AES console on eBay. I joined the
www.neo-geo.com forums and met two of my now best friends, Jon Maxwell and Kurt Pyron, who turned me onto some of the later releases in the library I never knew existed like The Garou: Mark of the Wolves and Pulstar. I knew Jon for a few months, and one day he was like “let’s go meet my friend Kurt in Columbus, he’s a huge Neo Geo fan.” When we made it to Kurt’s, after drooling over his insane AES collection he asked me if I ever played The Last Blade, and I explained to him that I never heard of it. He went on to tell me how The Last Blade was one of the later releases that had to be ordered directly from SNK over the telephone and went on about how amazing it was. We ended up playing it all day, and from the first 10 minutes I played it I was already thinking to myself how I would play Neo Geo till the day I die. That day, playing The Last Blade, is the day I went from Neo Geo fan to full blown Neo Geo addict.
What makes the Neo Geo so special to you personally? Definitely the games! There are approximately 150 games in the Neo Geo MVS library, and although the library is incredibly small compared to pretty much every main stream console, the library is strong. I could easily say well over 50% of the library consists of solid titles. There are only a select few games in the library that are total garbage. You just don’t get numbers like that with other consoles like NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis. The games also still look good today, have deep character relationships, epic soundtracks, and solid controls. When I play Neo Geo I don’t feel like I’m playing old games, because they still run smooth, look good, and feel polished. Only recently have 2D fighters started to blow away the graphical capabilities of the Neo Geo. The Neo Geo in some aspects is still better visually than modern 2D fighters. For example, play Ultra Street Fighter IV and take a good look at the backgrounds. There isn’t much there. Neo Geo went above and beyond to offer more than just the gameplay. You can play any King of Fighters game, and I guarantee if you take the time to look at the backgrounds you will discover something you never noticed before every single time. SNK really went all out in the detail department with their backgrounds, and I feel that adds a lot more charm to the games.
If you had to choose just one, which Neo Geo title would you rank as your personal favorite, and why? This is hard. You might as well ask a mother which child is her favorite, because to a Neo Geo fan this question is in the same ballpark. I have so many favorite games on the Neo Geo. Some of my favorites are Mark of the Wolves, Windjammers, Magical Drop III, Samurai Shodown II & III, Pulstar, Magician Lord, the list goes on and on… If I could only pick one though it would have to be The Last Blade 1. The Last Blade is just amazing! All the characters are appealing and fun to master. The animation is smooth, and the controls are spot on. I also absolutely love the deflection system, it makes the game so much more tactical. A once thought inevitable victoly! can be instantly denied with a calculated deflection. One of my favorite parts of The Last Blade though is the music, or lack of. Some of the stages have no music at all, and all you can hear is the crunching of the autumn leaves, and blades clashing. The first time I noticed this I was blown away. How could no music be this good? It just works! To me The Last Blade is one of the few games of the era that transcend just being a game, and experimented being a work of art. Whoever made The Last Blade had this vision in their mind, and they put their heart and soul into that damn game, and for that I am thankful. In a time when games were just trying to be profitable, The Last blade was trying to be an interactive, masterful work of art.
Why do you think the system has remained so beloved with gamers, even today? A lot of Neo fans would tell you Neo Geo is special to them because it represents something they could not obtain as a child. In a way I can understand this because I remember as a kid begging my parents to get me one, and the feeling I received after obtaining one as an adult. However, I feel the console is still beloved today because the Neo Geo has such a solid library of games. If the console consisted solely of titles like 3 Count Bout and Legend of Success Joe we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Ultimately I feel the system is so popular today because of the community. The forum community is passionate about keeping Neo Geo alive. The forums are always active with dedicated Neo-ites working on projects like the Universe Bios, MVS converters, Big Bear Shockbox’s, and converting exclusive Neo Geo CD games to MVS, like that was seen recently with Crossed Swords 2. The community is also very close-knit. Some of us like myself have been on the forums for well over a decade. Some people were even members of the community before Shawn, the owner of the forums created
www.neo-geo.com. Myself, and many other members are on a first name basis. We have traveled long distances to meet each other and play Neo Geo. For this reason the Neo Geo has turned us into lifelong friends. Neo Geo brings people together, and in the community you are like part of a family whose sole purpose in life is keep the Neo Geo alive and well.
If someone wanted to get into collecting for the Neo Geo today, what tips or advice would you give to them? Collect MVS! Home cartridge games are way too expensive. You will spend more money on a MVS setup opposed to an AES setup, but it will pay for its self when you save thousands of dollars on games, and it will allow you to play other arcade games. Neo Geo collecting is a gateway drug to arcade JAMMA board collecting, so just get a MVS setup now. Arcade cabinets are great, especially Japanese sit down candy cabs like the Sega Blast City and Taito Egret II. If space is a limitation though I highly recommend a supergun. This is a homemade console that lets you play arcade games on a standard television. There are many for sale out there, but by far the best quality superguns are made by a member of the Neo Geo forums called Xian Xi. This isn’t even a debate, Xian Xi rocks! Seriously contact him on the forums, or even better visit him on his website @
http://www.jamma-nation-x.com/jammax/index.html
What are your thoughts on SNK Playmore's attempts to keep the Neo Geo brand alive in recent years? There are attempts to the Neo Geo brand alive… LOL? I guess the answer to that is pretty weak. There just hasn’t been much attempt at all lately unless you count re-releasing games on mobile phone, PC, and pachinko machines. I mean KOF XIII was one of the better titles in the series in quite a while, but since then I just haven’t seen much of anything. In my humble opinion, SNK died right after the release of Samurai Shodown V Special. The Atomiswave was a failure, and the very small amount of original releases on next gen consoles has been pretty much non-existent. They haven’t really tried to compete with Capcom or Aksys at all, even though they have the skills to make just a good of game, if not better than anything Capcom has put out the last few years. I know that’s a bold statement to the majority of readers that are likely Capcom fan boys, but it’s true. If SNK Playmore actually put forth some serious effort, and released something like a Garou: Mark of the Wolves 2, or The Last Blade 3, and advertised on television, they would probably be in a much better situation right now. Hell, they could even tap into the action RPG market and do a new Crystalis. The way things are looking now we might have the next Konami on our hands real soon.
Do you think we'll see a system as irresistibly exclusive as the Neo Geo ever again? I would have to say in our lifetime no. A lot of things made the Neo Geo irresistibly exclusive. Mainly the price of the console, the price of games, and the inability for youngsters to obtain it. It was also marketed as more of an adult oriented console which was appealing to some people like myself. Furthermore, it brought the arcade experience home, which isn’t an issue anymore. The market is pretty competitive now, unlike the SNES and Genesis days when it was still blooming, and people had the balls to try and take a share of it. Also pretty much everything is on disc based media, so there wouldn’t be a way to release an overly-powerful console, jack up the price, and expect people to develop for it. I mean these days the arcade experience is at home! You can’t go out to an arcade like you use to, and come home to your vastly underpowered NES longing for more. The dream isn’t there anymore to bring that type of experience home, so I doubt anything will be released anytime soon, if ever, that compares to the Neo Geo.