Lets shift the perspective.......
At this point in time, how often were SNK characters showing up outside of Neo-Geo produced software (besides direct ports)? 1996 was a rich year for the arcade/MVS side of the house.
Another point to look at is how many other Viccom games are there? I am only aware of Fight Fever and the unreleased (for Neo Geo) Eye of the Typhoon, but are there more known inside the Korean speaking world of gamers?
Sometimes companies erroneously believe they have the rights to something and then end up spending real money on projects that can only be scrapped because things said while drunk and exhausted from a late light business meeting abroad turn out to not be possible. This may have been something like that, in which case it could still be Neo and I’d wager that it was, whatever there is of it.
The reason I say this is because from a financial perspective, since they are a known Neo dev, unless the dev has a way to make more money selling the game on their own PCB then MVS was for sure the platform to use. The carts were like %35 less than a standalone PCB (broad guess) and the MVS was really popular at this time and had been for some years, internationally. Making it for anything other than MVS would have probably been a bad move. I also can’t think of any reason SNK would want SNK chara on non SNK hardware.
They were still communicating by international FAX by this point (or had just transitioned from it) communication was not as smooth as it is now with Xoom and Google Translate and stuff. Whatever went into the game may have been completed between two meetings, and at the second meeting the SNK guy who didn’t make it to the last one said, “Ha! Oh, that looks great! But who said you could this?”.
Or perhaps SNK was totally on board but delayed the project until it eventually became KOF Battle de Paradise. (I only keep mentioning that game because nobody else is for some reason and it’s basically what a portable version of what Crash Zone would be).