The Neo Geo: The $650 Arcade Machine That Lived in Your House

Subscribe to the channel! @GameOverEmpires In 1990, SNK put a real arcade machine inside a home console and sold it for $649.99, the most expensive home console on the market when it launched, with games that cost two hundred dollars each. It was the most powerful console in the world, a literal arcade board sitting in your living room. Almost nobody could afford it. Only around 410,000 homes ever had one, and in 2001 the company that built it went bankrupt. This is the story of the most powerful console almost nobody owned, and how the very thing that made it the best is what killed the company that built it. It runs through a machine SNK first refused to sell you at all, a controller that was a real arcade stick, a memory card that carried your game from the arcade cabinet to your couch, a cheaper fix that broke the one thing the console was for, a pachinko company that bought SNK and stripped it for parts, and a cast of characters, Terry Bogard and Metal Slug and The King of Fighters, that outlived the $650 machine and ended up free on the phone in your pocket. SOURCES Wikipedia — Neo Geo (launch, price, specs, AES vs MVS, units, discontinuation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo TechSpot — How much did the Neo Geo cost when it launched ($649.99, $200–$300 games, ~$1,500 today) https://www.techspot.com/trivia/3-how... Video Game Console Library — Neo Geo AES (SNK's Osaka arcade roots, "an arcade system in your living room") https://www.videogameconsolelibrary.c... Film Stories — SNK's fighting history (Neo Geo CD and Pocket failures, 2001 bankruptcy, Playmore) https://filmstories.co.uk/features/sn... Wikipedia — Universal Entertainment (Aruze buys and strips SNK, 2001 bankruptcy, Playmore) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers... Wikipedia — SNK (company history) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNK Wikipedia — Super Nintendo Entertainment System (the counter-example, ~49 million sold) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_N... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Game Over Empires is made by myself, a person who loves the history of video games and the technology behind them, nothing more. Every video is for educational and entertainment purposes and reflects my own research, views, and interpretations. I dig into each story using publicly available sources, but mistakes and omissions can happen. Nothing here is professional, financial, or legal advice, and this channel is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by SNK or any other companymentioned.