Hi! So glad this is now official and getting such a warm welcome from the community!
I'm really grateful to Fraz who contacted me to participate to this initiative last year, I thought this would have been a great, unique project, allowing finally to share all the information we put together in almost 25 years... the result is an exceptional teamwork, of people sharing a great passion.
I'm particularly happy about SNK's official involvement beyond the mere licensing... after initial contacts (some of which I brought from my previous interview work with SNK in 2009) Bitmapbooks managed to present an idea that got their immediate enthusiasm, deciding to participate not just endorsing the initiative but sharing exclusive content, like interviews and material previously unseen which, I assure, all the hardcore fans will appreciate.
Far from the exceptional design work that Bitmapbooks is capable of, as already proved many times, as collectors we wanted this to be accurate, fact-checkable and exhaustive... we spent most of the time putting together sources with a new and fresh approach looking to magazines, advertisement and any kind of official material useful to present the most detailed history about neogeo, especially in the first years.
As an example, I went as far as buying all the Gamest issues from 1990 onwards (and some other magazine as well), going trough a thorough study and translation (by myself or when too difficult relying on a professional translator we hired) of articles and advertisement with the team, to understand and report the very beginning of the neogeo era, resulting in a deeper, structured and definitively more accurate dive into the "new world" SNK bravely brought to light in 1990.
I'm quite proud to say that basically there is no picture taken from the internet, as every document has been scanned from the original.. this can give you an idea of the monumental effort and amount of documents we (Fraz, me and Brian) brought together for this project.... not many collectors has ever done something like that and I hope this initiative will help other big collectors understanding they should probably do the same and share what they have, instead of keeping it dying on a shelf.
Speaking of previously unseen material, a special mention goes to Gemant, who contributed with a *unique* document, the most updated highscore list ever made (we are trying to include it as an appendix at the end of the book).
I'm particularly grateful to him as during all these years he kept tracking official records published by Gamest, Arcadia and NeogeFreak magazines, but also going together to the arcades in Japan asking for videos and meeting directly the players who made these world records...an experience that we would like to share with this book.
Finally, there will be another appendix where Gemant (mostly) me and Fraz spent a lot of work: the *definitive* masterlist.
I'd like to state that, while in the past there have been attempts to catalog all the release dates and information regarding the neogeo universe, for this book we adopted a fact-checkable approach, the only possible on an official publishing, so all the data reported has been retrieved from scratch, taking in consideration only official sources, in particular magazines like Gamest (both advertisement and the dedicated release date page) , subsequently NeogeoFreak, but also other mooks like All About SNK and so on... the result is a completely original, totally fact-checkable document, free from any influence of previous works.
This is the book that has been missing for more than 20 years... detailed, colorful, pleasant to look even just for the gorgeous pictures and, most important thing, written along with SNK itself... I hope you all enjoy it!
Massimiliano