The Fall of SNK (1994-2001)

NeoGeo CD

The NeoGeo CD was basically a NeoGeo with a CD drive and 56 megabits of internal RAM. Load times were generally unbearable.

Even though SNK had a hit on its hands with the arcade MVS hardware, especially with the constant influx of new fighting game titles, the AES console became increasingly more difficult to market as the caliber and number of games that were available for 16-bit consoles grew. Devoted fighting game enthusiasts might be willing to shell out $300 for an AES and another $200 per game, but that didn't translate into the kind of massive profits that SNK was looking for as a company. The general public was happy to get by with the huge selection of RPGs, fighting games, and action games available for the Super NES or Genesis, the majority of which were selling for $60 or less. Around this time frame (1992 into 1993), the Sega CD and TurboDuo systems burst onto the scene. Neither system would prove successful in the long run, but the buzz generated by the introduction of the CD-based storage format suggested that the future of home video game systems would rest with cheaply manufactured high-capacity discs and not the expensive low-capacity cartridges that had long been the norm.

The AES console's greatest disadvantage was the high cost of its games, which sold for roughly $200 a pop. In addition to the development costs associated with a full-featured game, the memory chips and circuit boards in a NeoGeo cartridge were extremely expensive. One of the advantages of CD-based consoles is that game discs literally cost nothing to manufacture. If SNK could cut its expensive cartridge format out of the equation, the company would be able to sell its games for between $40 and $60, a price level that would help the NeoGeo compete against the otherwise lesser-powered Super NES and Genesis. That's what SNK execs hoped, anyway, when they released the NeoGeo CD in 1994.

SNK introduced a double-speed version of the NeoGeo CD, the NeoGeo CDZ, in 1995, but only for Japan. In addition to cutting the load times in half for most games, the unit was 30 percent smaller than the original model.

September 9, 1994. On a single day in Japan, SNK sold through the entire first run of 25,000 NeoGeo CD consoles. Internally, the NeoGeo CD was nothing more than a NeoGeo AES with a CD drive and 56 megabits (7 megabytes) of internal memory. SNK also stopped producing its huge arcade-style joysticks in favor of a gamepad that was cheaper to manufacture and more in line with the existing game controllers of the time. The system itself still cost $300, but games for the NeoGeo CD were priced at a mere $40. From that point on, new games would come out for the CD unit just a couple of months after the corresponding MVS/AES versions. The only difference in the software was the loading times that came along as a result of the slower CD-based medium, a shortcoming that soon became the common complaint among many NeoGeo CD owners.

The benefit of the cartridge medium is that data can be moved from ROM chip to system memory in just milliseconds, which means that the transition from one scene to the next appears instantaneous to the player. The loading time in between stages in a typical NeoGeo CD game, such as King of Fighters '94, was 20 to 30 seconds--a nearly unbearable amount of time to wait between matches in a fighting game. It didn't help that the "Now Loading" message that popped up during these transitions came in the form of a goofy-looking monkey banging on a pair of conga drums. Ask any NeoGeo CD owner, and they'll tell you they absolutely hate that monkey.

Initially, Samurai Spirits RPG was released exclusively for the NeoGeo CD. PlayStation and Saturn versions followed, but the game was never produced for North America or Europe.

To solve the problem of lengthy load times, SNK released a version of the NeoGeo CD in early 1995 that used faster cache RAM. The new system, called the NeoGeo CDZ, ran all of the same software as the NeoGeo CD, but did so with half the load time.

In Japan, SNK marketed the NeoGeo CD aggressively. Along with the introduction of a double-speed unit, the NeoGeo CD saw a number of exclusive releases that the AES did not. One of these was Samurai Spirits RPG, a role-playing-game version of Samurai Shodown that unfortunately never saw the light of day outside of Japan. Perhaps the most popular of the NeoGeo CD's exclusives was Taito's hot puzzle game, Bust-A-Move, which SNK published for the arcade MVS and home CD system, but not for the AES.