1UP and others report that the PS3 and PSP will soon get Neo Geo Station, a downloadable emulator for that venerable platform.
I gotta stroll down Memory Lane for a moment here.
First, quick facts for our uninitiated readers (hi Mom!) – the Neo Geo was a home gaming system that came out in the same neighborhood as the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo. It was always considered the odd man out, and never really intended to compete with those systems. Indeed, Neo Geo really existed in a class of its own. Originally priced at $650, with game cartridges costing a solid $100 each, it was never destined to dominate homes.
Nor was it meant to. Developed by SNK, the console’s true purpose was to bring specific arcade games home, with duplicate graphics (something the Genesis and Super Nin still couldn’t do; arcades were in decline at this point but their massive cabinets had more room for more power, meaning better graphics). Anyway, the Neo Geo did as expected and later evolved into the core of many actual arcade cabinets: arcade owners and home enthusiasts could simply swap out cartridges rather than go through the trouble of replacing ROM boards or entire cabinets. The Neo Geo (and SNK) was known for 2d scrollers and brawlers along the lines of Metal Slug and Fatal Fury (this was also the age of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat).
This may come as a surprise to some of you, but as a young lad and even as a teen, Steerpike was a bit of a video game nut. It’s one of the many reasons he was so popular with the ladies and so well-liked at school. Living in an imaginary, if pixelated, world had its benefits; the drawback was that responsible parents and personal poverty (you make limited funds bagging groceries) prevented me from owning everything at all times.
I would go to the mall and ask to look at Neo Geo cartridge boxes at random. They were kept behind the counter, because at that price they were surely a target for theft, but since each box was the size of a Trapper Keeper I don’t see anyone shoving King of Fighters down their pants. But still.
I would marvel at the graphics, of course, and mostly marvel at the prices. One hundred dollars a game?! Even then my tiny brain was beginning to think in terms of business, and I distinctly recall sensing that the Neo Geo would never survive at such a price point. Still, though, I loved to go into stores and ask to look at the boxes. It was like holding something not forbidden but unattainable; something I desired but that was simply better than me. It was as if Babbage’s and Electronics Boutique kept copies of Scarlett Johannsson behind their wrap counters, and people could hold them and look at them, knowing they’d never be truly reachable.
The funniest thing is that if by some stroke of providence I’d received a Neo Geo, I’d have hated the thing. It was built as a showcase for SNK’s games, and SNK’s games were a parade of 2D brawlers and Contra-esque shooters: just about my two least favorite types of games. No RPGs, no good platformers. And in fairness to my juvenile self, I didn’t exactly want a Neo Geo. I just liked to look at it, and wonder.
This seems relevant to me as I contemplate the small mountain of computer parts I’m sorting through. I see a Diamond FirePort 40 – a PCI SCSI adapter that I bought at great personal anguish for $300 in, like, 1998. The anguish was on account of I didn’t have the money for it and didn’t need it, but I wanted SCSI for some reason. No one uses SCSI any more and most PCs don’t even have a PCI slot. I see a Radeon 9700 Pro – a special edition card that originally shipped only with Alienware computers, at the time worth about $400; currently worthless. Sticks of RAM clatter down the sides of my mountain like crumbling slate – dozens, hundreds, each hard bought and unlabeled. I don’t even know what most of them would fit in any more.
It’s amazing how the things we treasure lose value over time. I suppose someone could make an argument that this is a lesson about how we should treasure things of real value, like other people, but I hate people. And I hate the people who like people; especially people who like people and proselytize liking people as some path to spiritual enlightenment and a divorce from material obsession. Those people would benefit from a good tactical shotgun blast up the ass. How’s that for material, motherfucker?
I digress.
Soon the unattainable Neo Geo will be available emulated on PS3 and PSP. PSP! A handheld system! The games, once $100 apiece, will apparently sell for about ten bucks. Hell, GameTap has had Neo Geo emulation and several games for years now. Doesn’t it make you wonder about how the value of things change over time? That FirePort was the king of all SCSI cards, and demanded a $300 investment (not to mention the drives). Here’s one overpriced at $19. Has so much changed in the intervening years?
From the little boy swooning over Neo Geo boxes to the grown man able to afford nearly every sensible gaming investment that he may want, the lesson never quite dies in my mind. Oh yes, I think. I want this video card. It is the New Hotness. I know in three years I’ll turn on it, call it a dinosaur, and throw it in the pile. I won’t even try to sell it because it will be worthless. The remarkable thing is that knowing it will one day become worthless doesn’t really diminish its worth in the now. The truth, of course, is that everything is worthless. In the universe’s eyes, we and everything we’ve built are nothing more than a squandering of otherwise useful atoms.
And meanwhile, the mountain grows. But I don’t let it dissuade me. Some think of time as a river, flowing swift and true in one direction. But what if time is an ocean in a storm? In that case we’ve got to enjoy what we can while we can. So for those who bought a Neo Geo at $650, don’t feel ashamed. Sure, if you’d waited 20 years it would have been cheaper. But by the time 20 years have passed, there’re new and more delicious things to move on to.
Email the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
Suddenly a flash, and a useless piece of brain can be freed for other things. I’ve always wondered what those Neo-Geo boxes were, cluttering up the arcade. The arcade biz was in decline, and these trashy boxes were popping up everywhere with games I hated and the sun was setting on my youth and golden memories of arcade goodness. Of course, it makes sense that the decay path would take a trip through emulation and general purpose reusable consoles after the custom built board solutions went obsolete. As an equally popular and athletic engineering student, however, I was not particularly adept at investigation or inquiry, or business, actually, so the question, “what’s wrong with my arcade?” had remained unanswered.
Thanks for clearing up that part of recent history Steerpike.
Well, the pedant in me says that 2D “brawlers” that Steerpike is referring to were actually 2D fighters, not brawlers. That is, if he is referring to stuff like Fatal Fury and Garou: Mark of the Wolves (and King of Fighters etc.). And he is. In any case, these are some of the best games of their time and they are actually rated pretty high today so this is great news.
The cynic in me however can’t help but notice that whoever wanted to play these games probably already familiarised her/himself with emulation software and the ROM scene. Even on PSP I might add. The general atmosphere around Neo Geo games – extremely expensive and generally unaffordable is what I think made a lot of people feel less bad about pirating Neo Geo ROMs…
The realist in me says that this is nice news but only if we get to see some long lost classics. And that will depend very much on license holders. Sure, Virtual Console has some great games on it but also a lot of great games are missing. If the Neo Geo games on PSN store end up being just a bunch of Metal Slug and Samurai Shodown and KoF sequels then what’s the point? Sure, it will be nice to have them available but Christ, I have those in multiple copies on anthology discs made for multiple consoles that I own, PSP included. Yes, from time to time I will go out and by a PSN version of a game I already have (like Gunstar Heroes, right) but here I am not sure I’ll just go out and buy a bunch of Metal Slug games that I can already play on two consoles that are plugged into my TV at the same time as my PS3 is…
Neo Geo has a special spot in my heart. It came out the year I’d’ve graduated from high school had I not dropped out. While pointing and laughing at the ridiculous cost and having no interest in the games part of me craved one anyway and when I discovered there was a kid with one in town, a real jerk, I made nice.
I tried to make nice. He let me into the sanctum as an opportunity mocking my K-mart clothes and love of PC RPGs. We made a bet: if I could beat him once in Samurai Showdown II, even once, I could come to his house any time and use the console. It took hours but I cheesed a narrow victory and my love of ineptly button mashing fighters was born. Samurai, Art of Fighting and more–Neo was a fighter console first and foremost. (It’s high point though, was the Starcon port, which was better than the PC version and is still one of the best games ever made.)
My fighter skills have not improved but I’ve happily cheesed many hours of them on Dreamcast, PS2, and so on. There’s the nagging feeling I should finally learn how to play the darn things but there’s too much fun to be had hopping up and down and spazzing jabs and sweeps.
As I slip more and more into nostalgia, I think it’s great that older systems are becoming available again. It’s important to remember where we came from. Sure, a mobile phone these days would kick the shit out of a C64, but once upon a time the C64 was king.
The point is that we weren’t born with high speed internet, PS3’s and Xbox 360’s, even PCs or computers at all. Living in a developed country, it’s easy to forget that. We’ve made a lot of progress, technologically, and it’s important to remember that we are very privileged.
And getting these sorts of emulators into the common marketplace is wonderful for that. In the future, when I have a little Jarrod Jr, I hope to one day blow his mind with the ‘primitive’ games I used to play, and while he’s getting used to Terrabytes, amaze him with the graphics that could be teezed out of 64 kilobytes.
To this article I say ‘Well said.’
I concur with your observations about material things. I am a material person to a degree myself. I always want to have the “newest thing” even if I can’t afford it. I am ok with these things losing value over a relatively short period of time. The problem though is that now the “new” things are being made so cheaply that they rarely live long enough to lose their value. I think I am on my third Xbox 360. Ironically I got it mere weeks before I found out about the new Elite, so it’s already outdated. I’m also starting to lean more towards PC gaming now because at least I can fix my PC if it breaks or needs a better component. At the same time that I bought the 360 I finally made the switch to a nice HDTV. That thing is worthless now as well. It isn’t the manufacturer’s fault on that one though. My four year old daughter decided to try to clean it with a scrub brush. Fortunately I can wear dirty glasses and not see the scratches. Still I don’t regret any of those purchases. When you buy the “new coolness” for a ridiculous price you get the benefit of the amazement that can only be felt when a thing is new. Sure I could have waited a few years to buy an Xbox and got it for a way cheaper price. By that point though it’s amazing features would no longer be amazing. I would have been simply catching up on technology. There’s a special feeling about opening a nice shiny new whatsit and knowing that not that many people have access to this yet.
P.S. I loved your paragraph about people liking. I need to get that on a shirt.