Retro gaming for the rich with the Neo Geo (1990) | Show & Tell

The Neo Geo AES was a console I would have loved to have owned back in the early 90's. It may have shared the 68000 processor with my beloved Amiga, but that's where the comparison stopped. This was a sprite powerhouse with instant loading. An arcade experience in the home! It was great to be able to buy, borrow, and beg all that we had to show on the table, to delve into a world most of us could only have dreamed of back in the 90's. I hope you enjoyed the musings of us mere mortals about this giant of console gaming history.

I would sold my left bollock to own one if these as a kid....i finally bought one last year at the young age of 44.

I have both a CD and a CDZ. Guess which one I have plugged in?

Incredible tech for its time, the graphics still look incredible

Used to see it in comic books ads, never knew anyone whose parents eould ever buy one. Way overpriced

I always wanted a Neo Geo as a kid, until I played all the roms at a friends house on their re-release and I realized the selection of games suck. They just aren't fun outside of an arcade.
There were no SNES Zelda or Sonic 2 style games that you wanted to play for a long time. I don't like fighting games much and can't imagine paying so much just to play them back in the day with Super Streetfighter and even MK as options.

One of my friends had 2 older brothers and they bought a Neo Geo. My friends and I weren’t allowed to play with it, but it was awesome just to look at.

fighting games are not beat em ups. two different genres, or at least different subsets of a genre

I remember seeing these for sale in the game stores back in the early 90's and was impressed with the graphics because they rivaled my Amiga. The price was pure sticker shock though and I also remember these things sitting on the shelves until the brand folded.

Yes Neil definitely did have the cartridges lol

Growing up my friend claimed to have one, but it was "put away" in a closet, which seems odd, but this kids dad was beyond weird, lots of strange things going on with him, so they story seemed believable.

To this day im still not sure if he had one or not.

As an aside, his father still lives in the same house, and when i visit my mom, i see him out from time to time, hes just as odd and creepy as i remember.

Wait you had a queue for street fighter 2 ? What planet do you live on . Im older than you and i remember SF2 fondly , never and I mean NEVER at any arcade was there any kind of queue for SF2 . Maybe 2 ppl playing and you just set your quarter on to be next but thats it.

I'm surprised you mentioned CDi but neglected Panasonic 3do. Neo Geo was 649 in 1991 but 3do was 699 in 1993. Adjusted for inflation the 3do is about 8 dollars more.

I never heard of the Neo Geo until the handheld Neo Geo was released. Went to plenty of arcades but dont remember ever seeing a Neo Geo cabinet. Mostly played games like X-Men, TMNT, Spiderman, Double Dragon, Final Fight and Steet Fighter 2. I do own a Neo Geo now though and i kinda wish i had seen one back in the day, would have blown my mind. I guess the CPS2 is more nostaligc for me.

We had one of these things on a South London council estate - far from “rich” but very diligent at purposefully directing every penny. Absolutely crazy machine, literally transforming any bedroom or front room into an arcade.

We only got to play various games by swapping/part-exchanging existing games.

Cartridges ran from £70 up to £180 or so for the latest releases - this was around 1993.

System wasn’t economically viable for us so it was sold to a random console import/export vendor.

By then we had already been building a nice library of games on an imported Super Famicom (Japanese SNES), the Sega Megadrive, and our trusty old Amstrad CPC 464, so all was all lost 😊

How did I miss this upload :(

I just finally decided to buy a neo geo cd yesterday, still waiting on it to get here from japan. To this day, i still have NEVER seen any neo geo in person, besides the actual arcade cabinets. Can't wait to mod it and finally experience all the rich kid games

My first Neo Geo AES experience was on a holiday in Japan 1992. Saw the SNK building and got a free boxed Neo Geo AES with Last Resort. Which i still have in nice complete condition. Since 2006 i have a black Super MVS Converter 2 for it. With the MVS games Metal Slug, Metal Slug 2, Metal Slug X and Metal Slug 3. Since 2016 i have also the US Dogtag AES Last Resort in mint complete condition. Had more AES and MVS games bit i sell it for Commodore AMIGA 1200 hardware parts. Now i busy with the ZX Spectrum 128K Toastrack and ZX stuff.

The Samurai Showdown series were among my favorites, along with several shmups, Shock Troopers, Metal Slugs, etc. For years you could only purchase the 161-1 multicart for the MVS units, but more recently, like 2 years ago, AES multicarts are readily available. They may not have all of your favorite games, but for the price, they're worth it!

Totally remember this. I had an Amiga at the time, and there was one of these on the University campus. I was gobsmacked by its capabilities, even as an Amiga owner. In many ways, this was the first time the cracks started to show in my Amiga (500)'s closed architecture, and its lack of upgrade-ability. Of course, I still loved my Amiga, but it wasn't long after I saw the Neo Geo that I realised it was probably time to build myself a PC, and make the painful switch.

The Neo Geo! Man that system was expensive as I dont know what. I wanted one so bad but of course being 14 or 15 at the time I couldnt afford it, neither could my Mom. $899 in the US if I remember and the games were like $199 or $299....but went I got station in Japan I finally gotten one for $200 with a couple of games from a game store in Misawa. It was a Neo Geo CD. I had KOF 95, 97 and 99...i loved King of Fighters!!

Im a full time working adult and i still can’t fathom paying these crazy prices

The neo Geo along with the first samurai showdown made Street fighter 2 their bitch

The neo Geo was mainly made for fighting games like street fighter ect

It was the arcade machine at home hence the price.

The 3DO the most expensive game system

Mean Machines magazine made me drool over the NeoGeo

The Super Best Friends Play had a special place in their hearts for this console. If you know who they were, you know they were huge fighting game fans. If you don't, that's OK. Their channel is disbanded now, but all their old videos are still up to watch.

My friend's cousin had a neo geo but he only let us watch him play it on a 21" tv with a magnifying glass in front of it. As I remember he had 2 joysticks though so that must have cost a fair few bucks.

I marveled at this magnificent machine when I was young.. I still do.

I'm happy with my Neo Geo CDZ and I'm even happier that I bought it and the North American version of the games I have when I did. I wouldn't even contemplate buying any of them if I had to do so now.

The Neo Geo was the king. Playstation, Sega Mega Drive they were poor conversions of the Arcades and the Neo Geo was the most expensive console ever, than any other console and Geo Geo games were the most expensive than Sega games and Playstation games and some Neo Geo games cost more than any gaming console at that time.

Most expensive & had the most boring games

The Bally Astrocade is probably the inflation adjusted most expensive video game system. In the 70s, a new Bally was $500.

However in the 90s, at a thrift store, I found a Bally Astrocade, 4 controllers, and 9 cartridges, including Muncher and Blast Droids for $5.

I don't think Neo Geo had a dip in the market like the Astrocade did.

Heh, I have 2 AES systems in a box in my attic, I love the games and that but I don't have a big CRT TV to play on, so they have been gathering dust for a few years now. Actually I have 3x of AES but one doesn't work, which unfortunately is my Japanese one, I have a working US and Euro but the US one has flaky audio. My biggest single gripe with them is the prices of the games, I love some of the games but the best ones are so darn expensive I can't justify myself to buy them, like 4-500, so I play them on emulators instead.

Well. A 3DO cost $700. Which sucked compared to a Neo Geo.

funny enough, i didnt know anyone who had one. the console here in the states i believe had a pack-in game for a total of $600. i think todays worthless money it would come out to roughly $1400.00.

i was much smarter, i got a 3DO when that launched a few years later a for $700.......
the saving grace if there was much is the games were regular priced. good games for a that system were as rare as people owning neo geo's.

NEO-GEO
the champagne of consoles

Guys, are we getting old?

Yeah it was way too expensive to own compared to other consoles although some years later I did put down nearly $800 for the 3D0. I did however got to rent the NEO GEO CD but the CD version took forever to load because of the slow CD drive it had. Outside of that slow drive and load times it was fantastic. Plus I think it had the first controllers with analog joysticks. Me and my best friend used to rent the crap out of the NEO GEO CD. I wasn't going to buy it unless they put a faster drive in it though. Some years ago I found a MAME package that had all the NEO GEO games that worked on it for the PC.

I have a Neo Geo CDZ its awesome, load time not bad

I thought LaserActive?

There was a big review of Neo Geo and it's games in Finnish computer magazine MikroBitti in the Autumn of 1991. That was the first issue of a computer magazine we got in the home. I was nine and didn't have a lot of context for all the stuff in it, though I was extremely interested in games and had played a bunch of them (mostly at friends' houses). I think I thought a lot in the magazine was really cool. On the Neo Geo coverage, I do remember they of course made it a major thing how expensive it was, how it was like an arcade at the home, and how audiovisually impressive (but also shallow) the games were. It was really cool for sure, and seemed so far away as something to own or even see.. it was a mythical machine. If memory serves there was a big, nice photo of the console, the controller and a cartridge, with their sleek design. I think I still remember how reading and thinking about it felt. I've since played a bunch of the games but never on the original home hardware.

My sole rich friend growing up had one. I flat out did not believe him when he told me how much each game cost his parents.

I know someone who picked up a Neo Geo at a pawn shop.

I typed in Monster Joysticks on my url and got something quite different

My cousins by marriage parents had a lot of money he always had the latest everything he had a neo geo he was the only one I ever knew who had one.

i bought a used neo geo and a few games on the cheap, and i enjoyed my snes and sega genesis much more; the reason why is the limited content for the neo geo- all the games are designed to be quarter munching experiences in the arcade, so it translates into a different gameplay experience at home when you essentially have unlimited continues and dying in the game means nothing. however, the real problem is the variety of content for the neo-geo- having no sports simulations, RPGs, strategy games and so on, with the neo geo you are pretty much limited to a few different versions of the same type of beat em ups, tournament fighting games and side scrolling shooters. i liked king of the monsters concept, but it always seemed to me that the computer cheated and that it didn't matter how fast you mashed the buttons most of the grapples automatically went to the computer opponent; last resort was a spectacular looking and sounding shooter though

I remember making a friend in 6th grade who said he had a Neo-Geo AES. I called bullshit but he really did have one with more than just a few carts to my shock. This was late 1991

Not quite.

The Phillips CDi had it beat at $799.99 at launch.