While the 80s saw the home console market take off with the successful 8-bit machines from Nintendo and Sega, the dawn of the new decade promises to be full of promise (and prowess) with the arrival of the Coregrafx and the Megadrive. The overwhelming technology rivalry of the Atari ST and Amiga microcomputers will now have to rely on 16-bit home consoles! The arcade games are more and more beautiful and successful, but from there to be able to play at home? Nobody dared to think about it until then, given the importance of the technological gap - and therefore the cost - between home consoles and professional machines.
THE BIRTH (1990)
SNK, for Shin Nihon Kikaku, a small Osaka company founded in 1978 by Eikichi Kawasaki, is a successful video game creation and publishing company. After various successful arcade publications (Ikari Warriors, Vanguard, Prisoners of War), and very good adaptations on home consoles, SNK seeks to dominate the highly competitive arcade sector, be it in Japan as well as in the rest of the world. The editor, in the wake of Capcom, which launched its own hardware with the CPS in 1988, decided to create its own development platform for gaming rooms, but also its version in 'living' version: The Neo Geo . The MVS version of the beautiful appears in the arcades in January 1990, but it was not until the spring to see the landing of the Neo Geo AES-Advanced Entertainment System, the console version - and the end of the year for Europe and Europe. United States. It's a real technical revolution, and for the very first time the average consumer can get the arcade at home! The price is however prohibitively expensive, the console costing 3490 francs (535 euros) and games between 1790 and 1990 francs. It seems already overpriced, but brought back in 1990 in the economic context (SMIC at 4500 francs) is simply exorbitant ... In short, to get a Neo Geo with a single game, it was a month of pay that flew away. But in return ....
We sniffed dreams, and dream upscale! Countless colors, giant sprites, monstrous scrollings, divine music, profuse vocal digits, mind-blowing hard zooms, and so on. In addition, the Neo Geo was the first home console to integrate a memory card for backups ... revolutionary in 1990! You've understood that, for any video game lover at that time, the Neo Geo was the Holy Grail, the most hallucinating console of all time, the one that every player dreamed of owning ... dost he for this sacrificing father and mother on the altar of the Sacred Holy Arcade, forced to go into debt over several years to satisfy their dirty kids. The first games that come out with the console display a significant size: from 26 mega for League Bowling, 62 mega for Top Player's Golf, through the 46 megabytes of Magician Lord. Recall that in these remote times, a Megadrive game rarely reached 8 mega, and a game NES less than a mega! Result: games to the achievement far above the competition. To further enlighten your lantern, here is a technical comparison.
The other home consoles are technologically dropped by the Neo Geo, and even contemporary arcade systems are inferior in many ways to the MVS. It will be necessary to wait until 1993 and the CPS-II of Capcom so that the beast is dethroned on the technical plan. SNK's machine remains in history as the most powerful 16-bit console of all time, and one of the most powerful arcade systems of its generation. The life of the Neo Geo - and the MVS - would paradoxically demonstrate that the hardware of SNK would bury the CPS-II in terms of longevity, while competing in quality with the latter through the use of gigantic size roms. But this is another story....