Neo Geo CD

~ the goodbye ~

SNK spent the early nineties selling a home console for people who did not want a home console. The Neo Geo AES ran the identical hardware as the arcade cabinet, so the conversion problem never came up, and the cartridges were enormous and priced accordingly. Owning one was a story people told about somebody else's cousin.

The Neo Geo CD was the fix. Same board, same games, pressed onto discs that cost a fraction of what a cartridge did. It launched in Japan on 9 september 1994 at ¥49,800 and reached Europe that december, with north america waiting until january 1996 and a $399 price. On paper it was the most generous offer in the console market: arcade hardware at the price of a normal machine, with software you could actually afford to buy more than one of.

The catch was the drive. The Neo Geo had been designed around cartridges that the processor could address directly, so a disc version had to pull everything into memory before anything could start. The first units read at single speed. Loading ran thirty to sixty seconds depending on the game, and in a fighting game that meant a black screen sitting between you and the rematch you had already decided to play. A Fatal Fury 2 demo at the 1994 Tokyo Toy Show reportedly stalled for up to twenty-eight seconds between rounds, in public, months before the machine reached a shop.

I was ten when this thing shipped and nowhere near the argument. A console at that price was not a consumer product in Turkey in 1997, it was an import anecdote, and the machines I saw were the ones somebody else had already bought and set up. SNK sold 570,000 units worldwide across the whole run. GamePro noticed in may 1997 that the console had been discontinued, which is how the ending was announced.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the double-speed apology ~

SNK did fix it. The Neo Geo CDZ arrived on 29 december 1995 with a double-speed drive and cut the waiting roughly in half, and it is the model collectors buy today for exactly that reason. It never left Japan.

That is the part worth sitting with. The company identified the flaw and engineered the correction, then confined the fix to the one market where the product had already been judged. The territories still deciding whether to care got the slow machine, and north america did not receive its launch until three weeks after the fast revision existed on the other side of the world.

~ what actually killed it ~

Loading times get the blame and they earned some of it, but the calendar did more damage. The PlayStation reached Japan on 3 december 1994, twelve weeks after the Neo Geo CD, and the Saturn had arrived that november. Within a year the question every console had to answer was what its polygons looked like, and SNK's entire advantage was two-dimensional sprite work drawn by hand at a level nobody else could match.

Being the best in the world at a thing the market has stopped grading is a specific kind of death. The sprites in Garou and the later Metal Slug entries still look better than most of what replaced them, and that was worth nothing at all in 1997. SNK went into bankruptcy in 2001, and the arcade boards it had built the whole company around outlived the home machine by years, because a cabinet does not have to explain itself against a PlayStation.

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