Neo Geo Pocket Color

~ the eulogy ~

the neo geo pocket color did not reach turkey in any organized way. by 1999 i was 15 and the household had moved from 33.6k to a faster modem on ttnet. the handhelds anyone i knew owned were game boys or nothing. snk's pocket showed up in english-language game magazines for a year or two and then disappeared from the import pipeline. you could find a few units at a few istanbul electronics stores if you knew where to look. most people i grew up with were not looking.

what snk shipped: a 16-bit color handheld with a crisp little screen and a microswitched mini-joystick that arcade purists actually liked. snk's own franchises shipped in proper ports, including king of fighters and metal slug. it launched in japan on march 16 1999. the north american release followed in august and europe got it in october. the price point was around $69 in the us and ¥6,800 in japan, which was a meaningful undercut of the game boy color.

the early sales were respectable. 25 thousand units in the first two months in the us and north of 100 thousand units in europe by year end. for a non-nintendo handheld in the post-game-boy world that was a real start. the start did not turn into a middle.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was up against ~

nintendo announced the game boy advance in september 1999, six months after the neo geo pocket color shipped, and the spec sheet and the install-base inertia both moved away from snk almost immediately. snk's own corporate situation got worse at the same time. pachinko maker aruze acquired snk in 2000 and started cutting the parts of the business that did not feed pachinko, which the handheld did not.

~ what really happened ~

north american and european support ended on june 13 2000, less than a year after the launch in those markets. the japanese line lasted longer because the install base was bigger and the publishers were more patient. the final formal discontinuation happened on october 30 2001 in japan, the same month snk itself filed for bankruptcy. about two million units shipped lifetime across both the original and the color revision.

~ the long tail ~

the library aged unusually well. snk's pixel-art handheld ports are still considered the best portable versions of those games to ever ship, and emulator support arrived early enough that the catalog stayed playable on every generation of pc and phone since 2003. the device itself is small and cheap on the second-hand market. the screen is easy to retrofit with a modern backlight if you want to. it ended up being a museum piece that did better as a museum piece than it ever did as a product.

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