SNK

Japan · Founded 1978 · 1978 – present

The company that refused to compromise: SNK sold a home console that was literally arcade hardware, at $649 with $200 cartridges, and never pretended it was for everybody.

SNK traces back to Shin Nihon Kikaku — New Japan Project — established in Osaka by Eikichi Kawasaki, who moved the business into coin-operated video games as that market began its climb, and reorganised it as a stock company in 1978. Through the 1980s SNK was a solid second-tier arcade name on the strength of Ikari Warriors, Athena and Guerrilla War rather than a defining one. What changed that was a decision in 1990 that no other manufacturer was willing to make. The Neo Geo arrived in two forms built on identical hardware. The MVS, or Multi Video System, was an arcade platform whose multi-slot cabinets let an operator stock several games at once and swap them cheaply — a genuinely new commercial proposition for arcade owners, and the reason MVS boards stayed in service for well over a decade. The AES was the same machine in a home case, launched in Japan on 26 April 1990 and in North America that August at $649.99, with cartridges running from roughly $200 upward. Those numbers were not a miscalculation. Every other console of the era shipped a reduced version of the arcade game because the home hardware was cheaper hardware; the Neo Geo's proposition was that the cartridge you played at home was the arcade board's game, in full, with nothing removed, and the price was what that cost. It was never going to be a mass-market machine and SNK did not build it as one. The catalogue that followed made the company's reputation permanent — Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Samurai Shodown, the annual King of Fighters series, and Metal Slug from the acquired studio Nazca — even as the finances did not hold. SNK was sold to Aruze in 2000 and went bankrupt in 2001, reconstituting as Playmore, trading as SNK Playmore, and reverting to the SNK name in 2016.