SNK · 1994–1997 · About 570,000
SNK's answer to the $200 Neo Geo cartridge was a CD console with arcade-identical hardware and games at a quarter of the price — and a single-speed drive that made players wait up to a minute for each load.
The Neo Geo AES delivered real arcade games at home, but at a price few could pay: cartridges cost up to $300. The Neo Geo CD, launched in Japan on 9 September 1994 at ¥49,800, kept the same Motorola 68000-based architecture and put the games on compact disc, where they sold for roughly $49 to $79. The initial shipment of 50,000 units sold out within a month. The trade-off was memory and speed. Arcade Neo Geo games streamed graphics directly from large cartridge ROMs; the CD system had to load everything into about 7 MB of RAM from a single-speed drive. Loading times of 30 to 60 seconds, depending on the game, became the console's defining complaint,. SNK produced three models: a front-loader sold only in Japan (about 25,000 units), the worldwide top-loader, and the Japan-only Neo Geo CDZ of December 1995, which added a double-speed drive and eased the problem. The North American release came on 15 January 1996 at $399, by which time the PlayStation and Saturn dominated. Across its life the system received 97 games, eight of them exclusive, and had sold about 570,000 units by September 1997, when SNK wound it down.