Best Thing I Saw Today #26: ‘Neo Geo is the REAL DEAL’

Posted on a PC Engine fan forum, this letter from SNK (click image above for full version), maker of the Neo-Geo console, is all kinds of incredible.

The Neo-Geo, for those who don’t know the history, was a kind of super computer console of the early to mid-1990s (although games were released for it into this millennium). Prohibitively expensive, and, as its insides were an exact match of SNK’s arcade hardware, supremely powerful for a home console, its games cost upward of £200 a pop.

Home to the King of Fighters 2D beat ‘em up series and later on the Metal Slug games, the machine nevertheless always struggled to find software to justify its record-breaking tech specs and enormous price tag.

This letter, written as a response to someone who obviously wasn’t taken by SNK’s marketing, delivers a unique snapshot of the company (at least its US office) in 1991, just as the Megadrve/ SNES, Neo-Geo, PC Engine hardware war was kicking off.

Nowadays no hardware manufacturer would write to a fan rubbishing the competition in such explicit ways (and, if they did, certainly wouldn’t do so in this forum-post style, signing off as ‘The Game Lord’) so it really is a never to be repeated artifact from gaming’s early years.

Read the original forum post here.